Andrew Wylie, the agent of Salman Rushdie has stated that the award-winning author was still on ventilator after being attacked at a New York State public event on Friday.
This 75-year-old British-American writer, Indian-born and British-American, has been subject to Islamist death threats for his work.
“The news is not good,”Wylie stated this in an email sent to media. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”
While giving a lecture at Chautauqua Institution, New York State, the author was attacked in his neck and torso. Rushdie was taken by helicopter to the hospital following the attack.
Major Eugene Staniszewski of the New York State Police identified Hadi Matear as the suspect. This 24-year-old Fairview resident was arrested on the spot.
Staniszewski added that police are working with the FBI and the local sheriff’s office to obtain search warrants for the suspect’s backpack and electronic devices. “We don’t have any indication of a motive at this time,”According to him, the police believed that the suspect was acting alone.
In 1989, Iran’s former religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an edict calling for the death of Rushdie for writing ‘The Satanic Verses’, a novel many Muslims regarded as offensive to their faith.
The New York Post reported that Matar made social media posts to support Iran, its elite military unit the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and of course, of New York police sources. “Shia extremism more broadly.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul condemned the attempt on Rushdie’s life as “an attack on some of our most sacred values – the free expression of thought.”
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