Writer Salman Rushdie, 75, underwent surgery on Friday that lasted several hours and was on a ventilator and unable to speak. He was stabbed in the neck and torso at a lecture in New York.
“The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie, her literary agent, wrote in an email. “Salman will likely lose an eye. His arm nerves were cut and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” he continued.
The Indian-born novelist who spent years in hiding after Iran asked Muslims to kill him for his writing. The attack was condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an attack on freedom of expression.
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Rushdie was being introduced to lecture to an audience of hundreds of people on artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York when a man rushed onto the stage and attacked the novelist, who has been living on a bounty on his head since childhood. 1980s decade.
The stunned participants helped pull the man off Rushdie, who had fallen to the ground. A soldier from the New York State Police, who was security at the event, arrested the attacker. Authorities identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who purchased a ticket to the event.
“A man jumped onto the stage from I don’t know where and started what looked like a blow to the chest, repeated blows to the chest and neck,” said witness Bradley Fisher, who was in the audience. “People were screaming and screaming and gasping.”
A doctor in the audience helped Rushdie as emergency services arrived, police said. Henry Reese, moderator of the event, suffered a minor head injury. Police further said he is working with federal investigators to determine a motive. They did not describe the weapon used.
Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now Mumbai, before moving to the UK, has long faced death threats for his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. Some Muslims said the book contained blasphemous passages.
It was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations after its publication in 1988.
A few months later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, urging Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy.
The writer who called his novel “too light” went into hiding for nearly a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, was assassinated in 1991. The Iranian government said in 1998 that it would no longer support the determination, and Rushdie has lived relatively openly in recent years.
Iranian organizations, some affiliated with the government, have raised a multimillion-dollar reward for Rushdie’s murder. And Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in 2019 that the move was “irrevocable”.
Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency and other media outlets donated money in 2016 to increase the bounty by $600,000. Fars called Rushdie an apostate who “insulted the prophet” in its report of the attack.
Source: CNN Brasil
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