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Salman Rushdie 'news is not good'; he is on ventilator after stabbing
Hours after being attacked at the Chautauqua Institution’s stage in New York, news about author Salman Rushdie’s health “is not good”, his agent Andrew Wylie stated.
Wylie said in an email update to the New York Times that Rushdie is on a ventilator and cannot speak, his arm and liver are injured and he might lose an eye.
“Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” said agent Andrew Wylie, who added that Rushdie could not speak.
The Indian-born author lived under the threat of his assassination for over thirty years, since an edict calling for his killing issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini in response to his book "The Satanic Verses."
The novel was considered by some Muslims as disrespectful of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
Carl LeVan, an American University politics professor attending the literary event, told AFP that the assailant had rushed onto the stage where Rushdie was seated and “stabbed him repeatedly and viciously.”
Several people ran to the stage and took the suspect to the ground before a trooper present at the event arrested him. A doctor in the audience administered medical care until emergency first responders arrived.
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New York state police identified the suspected attacker as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from Fairfield, New Jersey, adding that he stabbed Rushdie in the neck as well as the abdomen.
The motive for the stabbing remains unclear.
An interviewer onstage, 73-year-old Ralph Henry Reese, suffered a facial injury but has been released from the hospital, police said.
The Chautauqua Institution said in a statement: “What many of us witnessed today was a violent expression of hate that shook us to our core.”
LeVan, a Chautauqua regular, said the suspect “was trying to stab him as many times as possible before he was subdued,” adding that he believed the man “was trying to kill” Rushdie.
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“There were gasps of horror and panic from the crowd,” the professor said.
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on 19 June 1947. He is an Indian-born British-American novelist.
Born to Kashmiri non-practicing Muslim family and today identifies as an atheist, Rushdie was forced to go underground as a bounty was put on his head — which remains today.
He was granted police protection by the government in Britain, where he was at school and where he made his home, following the murder or attempted murder of his translators and publishers.
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He spent nearly a decade in hiding, moving houses repeatedly and being unable to tell his even his own children where he lived.
He wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes (Ibn Rushd).
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