The News
The man who severely injured author Salman Rushdie in a knife attack in 2022 also faces three terrorism charges, newly unsealed court documents showed Wednesday. Semafor’s Jay Solomon first reported the possible terror link in 2023; US officials were skeptical of the connection at the time.
Hadi Matar was charged with trying to provide material support to Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group based in Lebanon, though the indictment did not say what evidence linked him to the group. It also charged him with committing terrorism transcending national boundaries and providing material support to terrorists.
Rushdie has been the victim of numerous death threats and assassination attempts — including a 1989 fatwa issued by the former Supreme Leader of Iran that called for “all brave Muslims of the world” to kill him — over depictions of Islam in his novel “The Satanic Verses” that some considered blasphemous.
SIGNALS
Attacker could have been radicalized during trip to Lebanon
“The portrait Matar’s mother painted of her son reads like the textbook case of radicalization,” Semafor reported in 2023. Silvana Fardos told The New York Times that Matar traveled to Lebanon in 2018 and came back completely different, a deeply religious Shiite Muslim and a supporter of Iran’s Islamic revolution. Middle East experts said Yaroun, the town where Matar stayed, is controlled by Hezbollah militants — and that it’s highly conceivable he could have received both religious and military training there. However, current and former US officials voiced skepticism that Iran or Hezbollah would conduct major terrorist attacks inside the US, citing the likelihood of an American reprisal.
Feds could argue Iran incited violence
While Tehran denied any involvement in the weeks after the attack, Iranian religious leaders praised Matar for seeking to carry out the fatwa. Even if Iran played no operational role in the attack on Rushdie, Semafor reported last month that federal prosecutors could argue Iranian officials and groups were guilty of inciting violence; the State Department sanctioned Iran’s 15 Khordad Foundation, which is connected to Iran’s supreme leader, in October 2022 for issuing bounties on Rushdie. Matar’s legal team anticipated the terror charges and sought to reach a settlement to reduce his overall prison sentence, but Matar rejected that deal earlier this month. The case is expected to go to trial in September.