Salman Rushdie, author of ‘Satanic Verses’ and the target for more than 30 years of an Iran fatwa, was hooked up to a ventilator after being stabbed in the neck and abdomen Friday in upstate New York by a man who was arrested.
“The news is not good,” he said Friday night on the New York Times British writer Andrew Wylie’s agent, 75. “Salman will probably lose an eye; the nerves in his arm were severed and he was stabbed in the liver,” he said, adding that Salman Rushdie, 75, had been on life support.
Stabbed in the neck and abdomen
Immediately after the morning attack on the stage of a cultural center amphitheater in Chautauqua, in northwestern New York State, Salman Rushdie had been taken by helicopter to the nearest hospital where he underwent emergency surgery, New York. York State Police Major Eugene Staniszewski told reporters.
Shortly before 11 am (3 pm GMT), “a suspect rushed onto the stage (of the amphitheater) and attacked Salman Rushdie and the interviewer” “stabbing” the writer “in the neck”, the police had announced very quickly, who said Friday night that Salman Rushdie had also been “stabbed in the abdomen”.
Conference presenter Ralph Henry Reese, 73, was “slightly injured in the face”.
The shooter was immediately arrested and taken into custody, with Officer Staniszewski revealing his name was Hadi Matar, 24, from New Jersey. Salman Rushdie was preparing to give a literary conference in this small town located 100 km from Buffalo near Lake Erie that separates the United States from Canada.
Carl LeVan, a political science professor, was in the room and told AFP by phone that a man had thrown himself onto the stage where Salman Rushdie was sitting and violently stabbed him multiple times. He was “trying to kill Salman Rushdie,” this witness said.
Still white from the fatwa
Salman Rushdie, born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence, was raised by a family of wealthy, progressive and educated non-practicing Muslim intellectuals. He had inflamed part of the Muslim world with the publication of the “Satanic Verses”, which led the Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini to issue a “fatwa” in 1989 calling for his assassination.
Therefore, the author was forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from hiding place to hiding place. Living discreetly in New York, Salman Rushdie had resumed a more or less normal life while defending, in his books, satire and irreverence.
But the “fatwa” was never lifted and many of the translators of his book were injured by attacks, even killed, such as the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, who was stabbed several times in 1991.
“Thirty years have passed,” he said, however, in the fall of 2018. “Everything is fine now. I was 41 at the time (of the fatwa), now I am 71. We live in a world where the problems of concern it changes very quickly. Now there are many other reasons to be afraid, other people to kill…”.
“A right that we must never stop defending”
Knighted in 2007 by the Queen of England, much to the chagrin of Muslim extremists, this master of magical realism, a man of immense culture who calls himself apolitical, has written fifteen novels, stories for young people, short stories and essays in English. . .
“His fight is ours, universal,” French President Emmanuel Macron launched on Twitter, assuring that he is “today, more than ever, by his side.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also told himself “Dismayed that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed to death while exercising a right that we must never stop defending,” referring to freedom of expression. The Association for the Defense of the World’s Writers, PEN AmericaShe also declared herself “shocked and horrified” to reveal that Salman Rushdie had offered her “help for Ukrainian writers” on Friday morning.
by his side, New York Governor Kathy Hochul he hailed “someone who has spent decades speaking the truth to those in power…who has fearlessly exposed himself despite the threats that have dogged him throughout his adult life.”
Source: BFM TV
