Acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator after he was stabbed in the neck and abdomen while preparing to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York on Friday morning, according to his agent.
Rushdie was transported to a hospital by helicopter Friday morning and underwent surgery for several hours in a nearby trauma center, Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, told the New York Times.
“The news is not good,” Wylie told the paper. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”
Police arrested Hadi Matar, 24, in connection with the attack on Friday. Matar, of New Jersey, had previously posted on social media in support of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Shia extremism, the New York Post reported.
“People were saying, ‘He [Rushdie] has a pulse, he has a pulse he has a pulse,’” one eyewitness to the attack and its aftermath told the New York Times. Another witness told the Times that “there was just one attacker,” and that “he was dressed in black. He had a loose black garment on. He ran with lightning speed over to him.”
Rushdie has been living under the threat of assassination since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — then the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran — issued a fatwa calling for the author to be killed in 1989. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988, and included what was considered by some to be an unflattering and blasphemous depiction of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
The United Kingdom and Iran ended diplomatic relations with each other over the fatwa, and only reestablished them in 1998 when the Iranian president at the time, Mohammad Khatami, stated that he would “neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie.”
There is a bounty on Rushdie’s head of over $3 million offered by a religious foundation in Iran.
Law enforcement sources reportedly told the New York Post that a preliminary investigation revealed Matar has posted on social media in support of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard, as well as in support of Shia extremism.
