Author Salman Rushdie arrives at the 2023 PEN America Literary Gala at American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The man who attacked and blinded Rushdie in 2022 is facing federal terrorism charges in a trial that started Wednesday. File Photo by Peter Foley/UPI | License Photo
July 22 (UPI) -- The man who rushed a stage to attack author Salman Rushdie will face federal terrorism charges in a trial that began Wednesday in New York.
Hadi Matar, 28, was found guilty of murder in state court last year and was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the August 2022 attack that left Rushdie blind in one eye and without use of one hand.
The federal case will determine if the attack was an act of terrorism and if he was carrying out a fatwa against Rushdie, set by the former Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, or if it was for Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, or neither.
Khomeini, then the ayatollah of Iran, created the fatwa in 1989 because of Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988. Hardline Muslims considered the book blasphemous because of the way it portrayed the Prophet Muhammad.
