New York: Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist who had to spent years in hiding after Iran urged Muslims to kill him because of his writing, was stabbed in the neck and torso onstage at a lecture in New York state on Friday and airlifted to a hospital, police said. Following the attack just before 11:00 am local time Rushdie had been airlifted to the hospital where he needed emergency surgery, and his agent said in a statement obtained by The New York Times that ‘the news is not good’.
After hours of surgery, the 75-year-old writer was on a ventilator and unable to speak on Friday evening after an attack condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on the freedom of expression. ‘Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged’, said agent Andrew Wylie, who added that as of now Rushdie cannot speak.
Rushdie was being introduced to give a talk to an audience of hundreds on artistic freedom at western New York’s Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist, who has lived with a bounty on his head since the late 1980s. Stunned attendees helped wrest the man from Rushdie, who had fallen to the floor. A New York State Police trooper providing security at the event arrested the attacker. Police identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who bought a pass to the event.
‘A man jumped up on the stage from I don’t know where and started what looked like beating him on the chest, repeated fist strokes into his chest and neck’, said Bradley Fisher, who was in the audience. ‘People were screaming and crying out and gasping’. A doctor in the audience helped tend to Rushdie while emergency services arrived, police said. Henry Reese, the event’s moderator, suffered a minor head injury. Police said they were working with federal investigators to determine a motive. They did not describe the weapon used.
Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now Mumbai, before moving to the United Kingdom, has long faced death threats for his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’. Some Muslims said the book contained blasphemous passages. It was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations upon its 1988 publication. Rushdie, who called his novel ‘pretty mild’, went into hiding for nearly a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was murdered in 1991. The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa, and Rushdie has lived relatively openly in recent years. Now living in New York, he is an advocate of freedom of speech, notably launching a strong defense of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after its staff were gunned down by Islamists in Paris in 2015.
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