ERIE, United States —
Salman Rushdie is on the “road to recovery,” his agent said Sunday, two
days after a shocking assault at a literary event left the British author
hospitalized on a ventilator with multiple stab wounds.
اضافة اعلان
“He’s off the
ventilator, so the road to recovery has begun,” Andrew Wylie said in a
statement sent to multiple media outlets.
“It will be long;
the injuries are severe, but his condition is headed in the right direction,”
Wylie said.
The agent said
earlier that Rushdie might lose an eye; he also suffered injuries to the
abdomen.
The author’s son
said Sunday the family was “extremely relieved” that Rushdie is off the
ventilator and has been able to “say a few words”.
“Though his
life-changing injuries are severe, his usual feisty and defiant sense of humor
remains intact,” Zafar Rushdie said in a statement.
The author, who
spent years under police protection after Iranian leaders called for his killing
over his novel “The Satanic Verses”, was about to address a literary festival
Friday in western New York state when a man rushed the stage and stabbed him
repeatedly in the neck and abdomen.
The suspected
assailant, Hadi Matar, 24, was wrestled to the ground by staff and other
audience members before being taken into police custody.
He was arraigned in
court on Saturday and pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges.
Questions surround suspect
Police and prosecutors have provided scant information about Matar’s
background or the possible motivation behind his attack.
Matar’s family
appears to come from the village of Yaroun in southern Lebanon, though he was
born in the
US, according to a Lebanese official.
An AFP reporter who
visited the village Saturday was told that Matar’s parents were divorced and
his father — a shepherd — still lived there.
Journalists who
approached his father’s home were turned away.
The 75-year-old
Rushdie had been living under an effective death sentence since 1989, when
Iran’s then-supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious
decree, or fatwa, ordering Muslims to kill the writer.
The fatwa followed
the publication of Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” which enraged some
Muslims who said it was blasphemous.
‘Back to normal’
In a recent interview with Germany’s Stern magazine, Rushdie had spoken of
how, after so many years living with death threats, his life was “getting back
to normal”.
“For whatever it
was, eight or nine years, it was quite serious,” he told a Stern correspondent
in New York.
“But ever since
I’ve been living in
America, since the year 2000, really there hasn’t been a
problem in all that time.”
After his move to
New York, Rushdie became a US citizen in 2016. Despite the continued threat to
his life, he was increasingly seen in public — often without noticeable
security.
Security was not particularly tight at Friday’s
event at the Chautauqua Institution, which hosts arts programs in a tranquil
lakeside community near the city of Buffalo.
The stabbing
triggered international outrage from politicians, literary figures, and
ordinary people.
US President Joe Biden on Saturday called it a “vicious” attack and praised Rushdie for “his
refusal to be intimidated or silenced”. British leader Boris Johnson said he
was “appalled.”
But the attack also
drew applause from Islamist hardliners in Iran and Pakistan.
Matar is being held
without bail and has been formally charged with second-degree attempted murder
and assault with a weapon.
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