The man convicted of stabbing author Salman Rushdie in 2022 is expected to appear with his attorney in federal court in Buffalo on Tuesday.
Matar faces an additional terrorism-related charge and could learn a trial date. The separate federal indictment alleges that Matar, 27, of New Jersey, was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the militant group Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.
Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after publication of the novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie spent years in hiding. But after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he had traveled freely over the past quarter century…