The attacker of the writer Salman Rushdie was accused this Saturday of attempted murder, the day after his attack on the author of “Satanic Verses” on the stage of an amphitheater of a cultural center, in the state of New York, United States.
White for more than 30 years from an Iranian fatwa, the writer was placed on a ventilator after being stabbed in the neck and abdomen. The attacker was immediately arrested and taken into custody, New York State Police Maj. Eugene Staniszewski told reporters, revealing the attacker was 24-year-old Hadi Matar from New Jersey state.
According to police, the suspected man had “run up onto the (amphitheatre) stage and (had) attacked Salman Rushdie and the interviewer” “stabbing” the writer “in the neck” and also “in the abdomen”.
Placed on an artificial respirator
Immediately after his attack, Salman Rushdie was airlifted to the nearest hospital where he underwent emergency surgery, New York State Police Maj. Eugene Staniszewski told reporters.
“The news is not good,” he said Friday night on the New York Times the British writer’s agent, Andrew Wylie. “Salman will probably lose an eye, the nerves in his arm were severed and he was stabbed in the liver,” said Andrew Wylie, adding that Salman Rushdie, 75, had been on life support.
On Saturday, Iran’s leading ultra-conservative daily newspaper, Kayhan, congratulated the aggressor. “Bravo for this brave and duty-conscious man who attacked the apostate and vicious Salman Rushdie,” the newspaper wrote. “Let us kiss the hand of him who tore the neck of the enemy of God with a knife.”
Salman Rushdie, born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence – raised in a family of wealthy, progressive and educated non-practicing Muslim intellectuals – set fire to part of the Muslim world with the publication of “Verses satanic”. “, prompting Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini to issue a “fatwa” in 1989 calling for his assassination. Thus, the perpetrator was forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from hiding place to hiding place.
Source: BFM TV
