On July 22, 2026, a federal trial began in Buffalo, New York, for Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie more than a dozen times at a literary event in August 2022. The attack happened in Chautauqua, about 70 miles from the courthouse where Matar now faces a possible life sentence The Guardian.

Matar is a 28-year-old US-Lebanese citizen born in California and living in Fairview, New Jersey. He has pleaded not guilty to three federal charges, including providing material support to terrorists — which means helping a terrorist group in some practical way — and committing an act of transnational terrorism, meaning terrorism that crosses international borders WRBL. A federal grand jury, which is a group of citizens who decide whether there is enough evidence to bring charges, issued the indictment in July 2024. It also requires Matar to give up any assets connected to the charged crimes U.S. Attorney's Office, WDNY. The U.S. Department of Justice is prosecuting the case. Jury selection was underway in late July Yahoo News, and the trial is expected to last about two weeks.

The 2022 attack left Rushdie, now 79, blind in one eye and with lasting nerve damage. He had been scheduled to speak about writers who live in exile. Rushdie is expected to testify at the trial.

Prosecutors say Matar carried out the attack on behalf of Hezbollah, an armed group in Lebanon backed by Iran. They also say he was following a fatwa — a religious order issued by an Islamic leader — that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued in 1989 calling for Rushdie's death over his novel The Satanic Verses. That fatwa has never been officially withdrawn. Iran has denied any role in the 2022 attack.

The government's case depends heavily on evidence meant to show that Matar planned the attack in advance and was in contact with people who encouraged it. Investigators found electronic devices and a personal journal in which Matar researched how to carry out an attack, including a note that Rushdie could die "any day now" and "So NOW or NEVER!!!" Court documents say Matar communicated with someone in Iran who told him they knew "where to find Rushdie" and that Matar asked whether the fatwa was still active. Photos of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor, Ali Khamenei, were reportedly found in Matar's bedroom. Prosecutors also say Matar made and shared propaganda videos before the attack, including footage from a 2006 speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Relatives say Matar became withdrawn after a 2018 visit to his father in Lebanon, which they point to as the start of his radicalization. He was 26 at the time of his federal arraignment in 2024.

This federal trial follows an earlier state court case. On February 21, 2025, a jury in Mayville, New York, found Matar guilty of attempted murder and assault for the stabbing Reuters. The federal case is different: instead of retrying the stabbing itself, it asks whether the attack was an act of international terrorism supported by a foreign organization and motivated by a government-issued religious order.

The difference matters for sentencing. A conviction on all federal counts could send Matar to prison for life — a longer sentence than the state charges alone could carry.

The broader question here is whether the government can prove that a single attacker acting on US soil was connected to a foreign terrorist group and a decades-old religious decree, especially when the accused was not a documented member of any such group and Iran denies any involvement.

Rushdie wrote about the attack in his 2024 memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which drew renewed public attention to the lasting threat posed by the fatwa nearly forty years after it was issued. His testimony in Buffalo will be the first time he faces Matar in a federal courtroom, giving jurors a firsthand account as the government tries to show that the stabbing was part of an international terrorism effort rather than a one-time act of violence.