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

Matar, a 28-year-old US-Lebanese dual citizen born in California and living in Fairview, New Jersey, has pleaded not guilty to a three-count federal indictment. The charges include providing material support to terrorists — meaning giving resources, coordination, or other assistance that helps a terrorist group carry out its goals — and committing an act of transnational terrorism WRBL. A federal grand jury returned the indictment, which was unsealed in July 2024. It also includes a forfeiture allegation, requiring Matar to surrender any assets connected to the charged 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 about 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 prosecutors work to show that the stabbing was not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of terrorism.

Prosecutors argue Matar acted in service of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, and in furtherance of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 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 relies heavily on evidence aimed at showing premeditation and coordination with outside ideological actors. 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 itself, 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.

That 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 broader context here is that the trial will 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. In other words, the government must persuade a jury that ideological inspiration and indirect communication are enough to transform a stabbing into an act of international terrorism.

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.