Salman Rushdie On Ventilator After Attack, His Liver Damaged, And Unable To Speak
Police have identified and detained his attacker. Identified as Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old man reportedly hails from New Jersey. Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed by Hadi Matar who rushed to the stage and attacked him.
Author Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck and abdomen onstage at a literary event in New York, US, on Friday. The 75-year-old author was then airlifted to the hospital and now is on ventilator. The author's agent said in a statement that Rushdie is unable to speak and could lose an eye.
On ventilator, Rushdie's liver damaged
Andrew Wylie, his agent, said that Salman Rushdie suffered severed nerves in an arm and damage to his liver, and could lose an eye. "The news is not good," Wylie wrote in an email. "Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged."
Visuals and images circulating on social media showed some people rushing to the stage and taking the suspect to the ground, before a trooper present at the event arrested him.
The moment Salman Rushdie¡¯s attacker was led off stage at the @chq. Via @AP.
¡ª Joshua Goodman (@APjoshgoodman) August 12, 2022
For more than a century the Chautauqua Institution has been a summer oasis for reflection, study and prayer. Today it¡¯s also a crime scene. pic.twitter.com/wP6J7doF1Y
His attacker identified
Meanwhile, police have identified and detained his attacker. Identified as Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old man reportedly hails from New Jersey. Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed by Hadi Matar who rushed to the stage and attacked him. Henry Reese, the interviewer, also suffered a head injury in the attack. "The motive behind the attack remain unclear," officials said.
Reuters
The author was to address a large audience on the topic of artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Institution near the New York city when the incident took place. There were around 2,500 people in the audience, who were evacuated later.
Faced death threats for his fourth novel
Salman Rushdie, the Bombay-born novelist comes from a Muslim Kashmiri family but later 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.
Salman Rushdie
Following which, the author who won the Booker Prize for his Midnight¡¯s Children (1981) spent years in hiding.
On its release, The Satanic Verses was banned in countries around the world for purportedly hurting the religious sentiments of Muslims for its satirical portrayal of the Prophet. Incidentally, India had been the first country to ban the book.
¡°The ban was a moment of spinelessness but it wasn¡¯t the only such moment. At the time of the ban, there were no copies available in India,¡± he said.
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