Salman Rushdie Stabbing: Author Now Off Ventilator; Attacker Pleads 'Not Guilty'

Author Salman Rushdie was taken off the ventilator last night as he remained hospitalised with serious injuries a day after being stabbed at a literary event, multiple reports said. The attack happened as he prepared to give a lecture in upstate New York.

Author's health update

Fellow author Aatish Taseer tweeted in the evening that he was “off the ventilator and talking (and joking).” Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, confirmed that information without offering further details.

Salman Rushdie

Attacker pleads 'not guilty'

Earlier on Saturday, 24-year-old Hadi Matar, accused of attacking Salman Rushdie pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges in what a prosecutor called a “preplanned” crime.?

An attorney for Hadi Matar entered the plea on his behalf during an arraignment in western New York. The suspect appeared in court wearing a black and white jumpsuit and a white face mask, with his hands cuffed in front of him.

Salman rushdie attacked

The author was stabbed in the neck and abdomen approximately 10 times, prosecutors said during the arraignment of Hadi Matar in a New York court. A preliminary review of Matar's social media showed him to be sympathetic to "Shia extremism" and the causes of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC).

The controversial book and the fatwa

In an interview conducted just weeks before he was stabbed and seriously wounded , author Salman Rushdie said his life was now “relatively normal”, after having lived in hiding for years because of death threats.

He also called himself an optimist, and noted that the fatwa, a religious edict issued in Iran in 1989 that called on Muslims around the world to kill him for blasphemy, was pronounced long ago.

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Born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, Rushdie moved to the UK. He has long faced death threats for his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses,’ most prominently from Iran’s powerful cleric and leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who had pronounced a fatwa calling upon Muslims to kill the novelist.

His 1988 book was considered by some Muslims as disrespectful of Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.