Novelist Salman Rushdie on respirator after being stabbed in New York

Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie went into hiding for years after Iran urged Muslims to kill him for his writing in the late 1980s. Hospital, police said.

After hours of surgery, Rushdie is on a ventilator and unable to speak late yesterday (Friday) after an attack condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an attack on free expression. was.

“The news is not good,” his book agent Andrew Wiley wrote in an email. He was stabbed and injured.”

Rushdie, 75, had been introduced to give a talk on artistic freedom to an audience of hundreds at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. At that moment, a man rushed to the stage and rushed at the novelist, who had been living with the prize money on his head since his later years. 1980s.

A stunned attendee helped snatch the man from Rushdie, who was lying on the floor. New York State Police troopers, who were 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 purchased a pass for the event.

Bradley Fisher, who was in the audience, said, “A man jumped onto the stage out of nowhere, appeared to punch him in the chest, and punched him repeatedly in the chest and neck with his fist.” ”

Police said doctors in the audience helped care for Rushdie while paramedics arrived. Event moderator Henry Reese suffered a minor head injury. Police said they were working with federal investigators to identify a motive. They did not describe the weapons used.

White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described the incident as “appalling.” “Thank you to the good citizens and first responders who helped him so quickly,” he wrote on Twitter.

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) to a Muslim Kashmiri family, Rushdie long faced death threats for his fourth novel, Satanic Verse, before moving to the UK.

Some Muslims said the book contained profanity. Upon its publication in 1988, it was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations.

A few months later, Iran’s supreme leader at the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against Muslims, accusing novelists and those involved in publishing books of blasphemy. asked to be killed.

Rushdie, who called his novel “pretty mild,” went into hiding for nearly a decade. Jin Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was murdered in 1991. The Iranian government said in 1998 that it would no longer support Fatwa, and Rushdie has lived relatively openly in recent years.

An Iranian organization, partly affiliated with the government, has collected a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s murder. And Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in 2019 that the fatwa was “irrevocable.”