The man convicted of trying to kill Salman Rushdie spent years researching the writer’s whereabouts before stabbing him on a lecture stage, federal prosecutors said last Wednesday at the opening of his federal terrorism trial.
It is a second trial for Hadi Matar, who was found guilty in a New York state attempted murder case last year. The federal terror charges focus more on Matar’s alleged motive for the attack on the renowned author and free-speech advocate in 2022.
Prosecutors started working Wednesday to persuade jurors that Matar was trying to carry out a 1989 fatwa, or religious ruling, that called for Rushdie’s death because of what some Muslims saw as blasphemy in his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses.”
Read the rest of the story at AP News.
