Hadi Matar's federal trial on terrorism charges begins on July 22, 2026, in Buffalo, New York, nearly four years after he stabbed Salman Rushdie more than a dozen times at a literary event in Chautauqua, roughly 70 miles from the federal courthouse where he now faces a possible life sentence The Guardian.

Matar, a 28-year-old US-Lebanese dual citizen born in California and residing in Fairview, New Jersey, has pleaded not guilty to a three-count federal indictment charging him with providing material support to terrorists and committing an act of transnational terrorism WRBL. The indictment was returned by a federal grand jury, unsealed in July 2024, and includes a forfeiture allegation requiring Matar to surrender any assets derived from or used in the commission of the charged terrorism offenses U.S. Attorney's Office, WDNY. The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of New York are prosecuting the case. Jury selection was underway in late July Yahoo News, and the trial is expected to last approximately two weeks.

The August 2022 attack left Rushdie, now 79, blind in one eye and suffering lasting nerve damage. He had been scheduled to speak about writers in political exile. Rushdie is expected to testify at the federal trial, as is the prosecution's broader effort to establish a terrorism nexus extending well beyond the stabbing itself.

Prosecutors argue Matar acted in service of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, and in furtherance of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Rushdie over the novel The Satanic Verses. A fatwa is a religious edict issued by an Islamic authority; Khomeini's called for Rushdie's death and has never been formally revoked. Iran has denied involvement in the 2022 attack.

The government's case rests substantially on evidence purporting to show premeditation and external ideological coordination. Investigators recovered electronic devices and a personal journal from Matar containing detailed research into how an attack might be carried out, including a note that Rushdie could die "any day now" and "So NOW or NEVER!!!" Court filings claim Matar corresponded with an Iran-based contact in the months before the stabbing who said he knew "where to find Rushdie," and that Matar asked whether the fatwa remained active. Photographs of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Ali Khamenei were reportedly found in Matar's New Jersey bedroom. Prosecutors further allege that Matar produced and circulated propaganda videos in the months before the attack, incorporating a 2006 speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah condemning cartoon depictions of the prophet.

Matar's path to radicalization, as reconstructed by relatives, traces to a 2018 visit to his father in Lebanon, after which he grew withdrawn. He was 26 at the time of his federal arraignment in 2024.

The federal proceedings follow a separate state conviction. On February 21, 2025, a jury in Mayville, New York, found Matar guilty of attempted murder and assault in connection with the stabbing Reuters. The federal case adds a distinct layer: rather than retrying the act of violence, it seeks to establish that the attack constituted transnational terrorism, materially supported by a designated foreign organization and motivated by a state-issued religious decree.

The distinction carries significant sentencing consequences. A conviction on all federal counts would expose Matar to life imprisonment, a term beyond what the state charges alone could impose. The trial will also test the evidentiary threshold for linking a lone-actor assault on US soil to a foreign terrorist organization and a decades-old state fatwa, particularly when the accused maintained no documented organizational membership and the implicated state denies any role.

Rushdie addressed the attack in his 2024 memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, a work that recentered public attention on the enduring threat the fatwa poses nearly four decades after its issuance. His expected testimony in Buffalo will mark the first time he has confronted Matar in a federal courtroom, adding a first-person dimension to the government's effort to situate the stabbing within an international terrorism framework rather than treating it as an isolated act of violence.