A federal jury has convicted Hadi Matar, 28, of terrorism charges over his 2022 stabbing attack on author Salman Rushdie, deliberating for only a couple of hours before finding him guilty on all counts, including engaging in transnational terrorism. The verdict confirms prosecutors' case that the attack, which left Rushdie blind in one eye, was a deliberate act of religiously motivated violence rather than an isolated assault, reinforcing the long shadow cast by Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against the author.

Matar attacked Rushdie on stage during an August 2022 speaking event at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, stabbing him 15 times as he was about to discuss the safety of writers. He is already serving a 25-year New York state sentence for attempted murder, and now faces a possible life sentence at his federal sentencing, scheduled for 3 November. Prosecutors said electronic messages showed Matar researching Khomeini's fatwa over Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" and writing "We need to kill him ASAP"; the book had previously sparked deadly riots that killed at least 45 people and attacks on its translators and publishers.