Hadi Matar chose not to testify or call any witnesses in his federal terrorism trial on Tuesday, leaving his defense without a single piece of testimony before the case heads to the jury as soon as Wednesday.

Prosecutors rested their case the same day, according to ABC News. Closing arguments are expected Wednesday morning in a federal courthouse in Buffalo, N.Y.

Matar, 28, has pleaded not guilty to federal charges including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism. His defense attorney, Nathaniel Barone, has argued that federal prosecutors are making implications about Matar's intentions but lack proof. It is the same approach Matar took at his 2025 state trial, where he also declined to take the stand.

The case stems from an August 2022 attack at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. Salman Rushdie, the acclaimed novelist born in India into a Muslim family and now a U.S. citizen, was about to give a talk about writers' safety when a man rushed the stage and stabbed him 15 times. The attack left Rushdie blind in one eye.

Henry Reese, another speaker at the event, helped restrain the assailant alongside spectators. Matar initially gave authorities a fake driver's license but then disclosed his real name to a state trooper.

Rushdie testified in the federal trial the previous week. The 78-year-old author has lived under threat since 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa — a religious edict — calling for Rushdie's death over his novel "The Satanic Verses." Rushdie went into hiding for years and gradually re-emerged after Iran's government distanced itself from the fatwa in 1998.

Prosecutors contend Matar was acting upon that fatwa. According to court testimony, Matar started researching Rushdie's whereabouts in 2020 and wrote in private notes, "we need to kill him ASAP" and "become a warrior and just get it over with." Prosecutors also say Matar, a U.S.-born American-Lebanese citizen from New Jersey, acted out of loyalty to Iran and the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah. The late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in 2006 that if someone had carried out the fatwa, European newspapers would not have dared publish a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

Iran's government has denied involvement in the 2022 stabbing.

Matar has already been convicted at the state level. A New York jury found him guilty of attempted murder in February 2025 after deliberating for less than two hours, and he was also convicted of assault for wounding Reese during the attack. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison on the state charge. The federal trial, which opened July 22, 2026, carries separate terrorism-related charges that could add to that sentence.

The case now moves to a federal jury after a trial that lasted less than a week.