Newsman : A suspect has been charged with attempted murder in the attack on renowned author Salman Rushdie Friday at a speaking event in New York state. Rushdie was stabbed at least once in the neck and abdomen and was transported by helicopter to a trauma center in Erie, Pennsylvania, police said. The alleged attacker is Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was arrested at the scene by a New York State Police trooper. According to law enforcement official.
Salman Rushdie, is slowly recovering after suffering stab wounds in the neck and chest, his family says.
“Though his life changing injuries are severe, his usual feisty & defiant sense of humour remains intact,” the author’s son, Zafar Rushdie, wrote in a statement on Twitter on Sunday.
The novelist was taken off a ventilator and able to speak “a few words,” according to his son. However, Rushdie remains in critical condition, he added, and will stay in the hospital to receive “extensive ongoing medical treatment.”
Rushdie, 75, was poised to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York on Friday, when a man went up on stage and repeatedly stabbed the author.
Rushdie’s agent had previously said that the author had undergone surgery and suffered a damaged liver, severed nerves in his arm and eye, and could likely lose an eye.
Rushdie was scheduled to give a lecture at the education center Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, in southwestern New York, Friday morning. At around 11 a.m., a man “ran up onto the stage and attacked Rushdie and an interviewer,” according to New York State Police. The interviewer, Henry Reese, 73, suffered a minor head injury during the attack, police said. He was treated for a facial injury at a nearby hospital and has since been released, police said.
Rushdie went through a surgery and was on a ventilator. The author will likely lose one eye as a result of the attack, his agent said. The nerves in his arm were also severed and his liver was damaged in the stabbing, his agent said.
Matar has been charged with attempted murder in the second degree and assault in the second degree, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said Saturday. He was arraigned Friday night and remanded without bail, Schmidt said.
Matar pleaded not guilty to the charges in court on Saturday, the Associated Press reported. An attorney entered the plea on his behalf, the AP said.
A judge ordered him held without bail after prosecutors argued the attack was “targeted, unprovoked, preplanned,” while public defender Nathaniel Barone said Matar has the “constitutional right of presumed innocence,” the AP reported.
Law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation that “a preliminary investigation into the suspected perpetrator’s probable social media presence indicates a likely adherence or sympathy towards Shi’a extremism and sympathies to the Iranian regime/Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
The officials say investigators found photos on Matar’s phone of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of Iraq’s pro-Iranian militia movement, who were killed by U.S. forces in a drone strike in Baghdad on Jan. 3, 2020.
Police believe the suspect acted alone and were in the process Friday of obtaining search warrants for items including electronics and a backpack found at the scene that they believe belong to the suspect, Major Eugene Staniszewski, a troop commander for the New York State Police, told reporters during a press briefing Friday afternoon.
The FBI is also assisting with the investigation, he said.
The suspect had a pass to access the event, officials said.
Chautauqua Institution president Michael Hill said during Friday’s press briefing that security “has been a top priority,” and that they had a state trooper and sheriff presence at the event.
“We’ll continue to look at providing the maximum security that we can,” Hill said. “This has never happened in our entire history. Chautauqua has always been an extremely safe place. We will continue to be working to keep that tradition going.”
Those in the audience expressed shock at the attack.
The late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accused the author of blasphemy over the book and in 1989 issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling for his death.
Rushdie spent years in hiding, which he chronicled in his 2012 memoir, “Joseph Anton.” The book was nominated for the United Kingdom’s top nonfiction award, the Samuel Johnson prize.
In 1998, the Iranian foreign minister said that the country no longer supported the fatwa against Rushdie, though a bounty for his death continues to be offered by an Iranian religious foundation. In 2012, the group increased the bounty from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.
Others have been attacked in connection with “The Satanic Verses,” which was banned in several countries following its publication. Among them, Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated the book into Japanese, was stabbed to death in 1991 on the campus where he taught literature.
Rushdie has authored over a dozen books, including the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children,” and is a former president of the literary and human rights organization PEN America.
PEN America expressed “shock and horror” at the attack on Rushdie.
“We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil,” Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, said in a statement.
“Salman Rushdie has been targeted for his words for decades but has never flinched nor faltered,” she continued. “While we do not know the origins or motives of this attack, all those around the world who have met words with violence or called for the same are culpable for legitimizing this assault on a writer while he was engaged in his essential work of connecting to readers.”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the attack was “reprehensible.”
“Today, the country and the world witnessed a reprehensible attack against the writer Salman Rushdie,” Sullivan said in a statement. “This act of violence is appalling. All of us in the Biden-Harris Administration are praying for his speedy recovery.”
President Joe Biden also said in a statement Saturday that he and the first lady were “shocked and saddened to learn of the vicious attack.”
“We, together with all Americans and people around the world, are praying for his health and recovery,” he said.
