Defendant in Salman Rushdie stabbing declines to testify in terrorism trial

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — The man on trial in the stabbing of Salman Rushdie chose Tuesday not to testify or call any witnesses in the federal terrorism case, which is expected to head to the jury as soon as Wednesday.

Hadi Matar's lawyer told the court that the 28-year-old — who already has been convicted of state-level attempted murder charges — wouldn't take the stand at his trial on charges that include engaging in an act of transnational terrorism.

“At this time, the defense rests,” attorney Nathaniel Barone said. Matar has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors also rested their case Tuesday, and closing arguments are expected Wednesday morning. Rushdie, the prize-winning author of novels including “Midnight’s Children” and the controversial “The Satanic Verses,” testified last week about the 2022 attack that nearly killed him and left him blind in one eye.

Rushdie was about to give a talk — about writers' safety, no less — when his attacker climbed on stage behind him and stabbed him 15 times in front of a stunned audience at the Chautauqua Institution, an arts and intellectual retreat.

Spectators and another speaker, Henry Reese, scrambled to aid Rushdie and restrain the assailant, who was arrested by law enforcement officers assigned to the event. He initially gave authorities a fake driver's license, but Matar soon disclosed his real name to a state trooper, according the trooper's testimony and body camera video.

Prosecutors contend that Matar was acting upon a former Iranian leader's 1989 call for Rushdie's death because of “The Satanic Verses,” which ignited protests across the Muslim world. Some believers considered it blasphemous because of a dream sequence featuring Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

Rushdie, who was born in India into a Muslim family and is now a U.S. citizen, went into hiding for years. He gradually emerged after Iran's government distanced itself in 1998 from the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini 's fatwa, or religious order, about the writer. Khomenei died in 1989.

Prosecutors say Matar, a U.S.-born American-Lebanese citizen, acted out of loyalty to Iran and to the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militant group. The late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in 2006 that if someone had carried out the fatwa, European newspapers wouldn't have dared publish a caricature of Muhammad that was causing an uproar in Muslim communities.

Iran’s government denied involvement in the 2022 stabbing, though its Foreign Ministry’s then-spokesperson suggested Rushdie courted trouble by insulting Islam. Nasrallah did not comment on the attack.

The U.S. government designates Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization. Matar, too, described the group in a 2016 paper as a terrorist organization, Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Lynch said Tuesday during legal arguments when jurors were out of the room.

Matar started researching Rushdie's whereabouts in 2020, eventually writing in private notes that “we need to kill him ASAP” and “become a warrior and just get it over with,” prosecutors have said.

Matar didn't testify at his 2025 state court trial, either. His lawyer has said federal prosecutors are making implications but don't have proof about the man’s intentions.

“There’s no facts. There’s no hard evidence,” Barone said in an interview outside the courthouse last week. “There could be a number of reasonable, plausible explanations as to what he was thinking.”

Barone unsuccessfully argued Tuesday that prosecutors hadn't presented enough evidence for the trial to continue. A judge declined Barone's request to dismiss the case.

Matar is currently serving a 25-year state prison sentence. If convicted in the federal case, he faces a potential life sentence.

Peltz reported from New York.

In this courtroom sketch, Salman Rushdie, left, testifies in federal court during the terrorism trial for Hadi Matar, Rushdie's alleged attacker, shown second from bottom left, Thursday, July 23, 2026, in Buffalo, N.Y. (Alexandra Newbould via AP)

In this courtroom sketch, Salman Rushdie, left, testifies in federal court during the terrorism trial for Hadi Matar, Rushdie's alleged attacker, Thursday, July 23, 2026, in Buffalo, N.Y. (Alexandra Newbould via AP)

FILE - Hadi Matar walks in to the Chautauqua County court in Mayville, N.Y., May, 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus, File)

FILE - Novelist Salman Rushdie attends the premiere of the documentary film "Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie" during the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 25, 2026, at The Ray in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

In this courtroom sketch, Hadi Matar, center, sits in federal court during his terrorism trial for his alleged attack on Salman Rushdie, Wednesday, July 22, 2026, in Buffalo, N.Y. (Alexandra Newbould via AP)

STARKE, Fla. (AP) — Florida is set to become the first state in nearly a decade to carry out two executions in a single day, planning lethal injections Tuesday for an ex-police officer convicted of a young girl's murder and an octogenarian who would be the second-oldest inmate put to death in modern U.S. history.

The planned injections come 18 months after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis began stepping up executions at a rate unseen in modern times in Florida. Not since 2017 when Arkansas carried out two death sentences on the same day has a state planned back-to-back executions.

Since the beginning of 2025, Florida has carried out nearly half of all the state executions in the U.S.

James Aren Duckett, 68, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at noon at Florida State Prison near Starke, followed about six hours later by 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone, who also would become the oldest prisoner executed in Florida's modern history.

Duckett was convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl while working as a police officer in a small central Florida city in 1987, and Occhicone was convicted of the 1986 killings of his ex-girlfriend’s parents.

They would become Florida’s 11th and 12th inmates to be executed this year.

The Florida Supreme Court denied appeals for both men last week, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied them on Tuesday.

Duckett’s attorneys had asked for another stay, claiming that Duckett is innocent and that the state’s handling of the DNA evidence is the reason for the inconclusive results. Occhicone’s attorneys argued that several age-related ailments, including kidney and prostate problems, could make his execution especially painful, constituting cruel and unusual punishment.

A Florida prison official said Tuesday morning that the department was confident in its readiness to carry out both executions.

The governor hasn’t said why he scheduled two executions on the same day.

DeSantis, who leaves office in January, oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, more in a single year than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976. The previous high was eight executions set in 2014.

Florida has executed 29 people since the beginning of 2025 while the rest of the U.S. states combined have carried out 35 executions over the same time frame.

If Tuesday’s executions proceed, that would bring the total for DeSantis’ final two years in office up to 31 overall, compared to just nine executions during the first six years of his administration. Another execution is scheduled for August.

DeSantis initially signed a death warrant for Duckett in February, setting a March execution date. But the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay just days before that date to allow for DNA testing of old evidence that couldn’t be performed at the time of the original trial because of technical limitations. The results were inconclusive, meaning they did not exonerate Duckett or definitively connect him to the crime. Judges have allowed the jury verdict to stand.

When Occhicone's death warrant was signed late last month, his was the only execution scheduled for Tuesday. But after the Florida Supreme Court removed Duckett's stay on July 8, DeSantis signed a new death warrant and added Duckett to Occhicone’s execution date, which hadn't been done in Florida in more than 60 years. Florida Department of Corrections records show multiple executions on a single day were more common in the past, with the last being on May 12, 1964.

Nationwide, it's not uncommon for two different states to hold executions on the same date, but it's less common for a single state to perform two. Before Arkansas executed two inmates on the same day in 2017, Texas executed two convicted killers on a single day in 2000, the year it put to death 40 prisoners.

Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has urged DeSantis to halt both executions.

“July 28 represents an unprecedented escalation of Florida’s use of the death penalty,” the group’s executive director, Grace Hanna, said in a statement. “These are two profoundly different cases, but they point to the same troubling reality: Florida continues to expand the use of capital punishment, despite mounting evidence that it is not what Floridians want.”

The governor's office has rarely commented on executions over the past 18 months. DeSantis has previously said his goal is to bring justice to victims’ families who have waited decades for sentences to be carried out.

“Some of these crimes were committed in the ’80s,” the governor said in 2025. “Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly. If I honestly thought someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger.”

Occhicone would become Florida's oldest inmate to be executed, just weeks after two 74-year-old men briefly held that spot, the second man just a week older than the first at his time of death. Recent executions have highlighted the nation's aging death-row population and renewed questions about the humanity of administering capital punishment to inmates who might die soon from natural causes.

Occhicone also would become the second-oldest prisoner known to be executed in modern U.S. history after 83-year-old Walter Moody Jr. in Alabama in 2018. Moody was condemned for a wave of mail bombs in 1989 that killed a federal judge and wounded a Black civil rights attorney.

Florida executions are all by injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.

This combo from photos provided by Florida Department of Corrections shows from left, James Aren Duckett and Dominick Anthony Occhicone. (Florida Department of Corrections via AP)

FILE - Clouds hover over the entrance of the Florida State Prison in Starke, Fla., Aug. 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Curt Anderson, file)