(New York) Salman Rushdie, author of satanic verses and target for more than 30 years of a fatwa from Iran, was placed on a ventilator after being stabbed in the neck and abdomen in New York state on Friday by a man who was arrested.
Posted at 11:27
Updated at 8:55 p.m.
“The news is not good,” said Friday evening at the New York Times the agent of 75-year-old British writer Andrew Wylie.
“Salman will probably lose an eye; the nerves in his arm were severed and he was stabbed in the liver, ”detailed Mr. Wylie, adding that Mr. Rushdie, 75, had been placed on an artificial respirator.
Immediately after the attack in the morning on the stage of an amphitheater of a cultural center in Chautauqua, in the northwestern part of the State of New York, Salman Rushdie had been transported by helicopter to the hospital most near where he underwent emergency surgery, New York State Police Major Eugene Staniszewski told reporters.
Shortly before 11 a.m., “a suspect rushed onto the stage (of the amphitheater) and attacked Salman Rushdie and the interviewer” by “stabbing” the writer “in the neck”, the police had very quickly announced. who clarified Friday evening that Mr. Rushdie had also been “stabbed in the abdomen”.
The presenter of the conference, Ralph Henry Reese, 73, was “slightly injured in the face”.
The attacker was immediately arrested and taken into custody, with Officer Staniszewski revealing his name was Hadi Matar, 24, from New Jersey.
PHOTO CHARLES FOX, ASSOCIATED PRESS
The suspect of the attack, Hadi Matar, 24, was arrested by the police.
Mr. Rushdie was preparing to give a literary lecture in this small town located 100 km from Buffalo near Lake Erie which separates the United States from Canada.
Carl LeVan, professor of political science, was in the room, and told AFP on the phone that a man had thrown himself on the stage where Mr. Rushdie was sitting to stab him violently several times.
“Killing Salman Rushdie”
He “was trying to kill Salman Rushdie,” said this witness.
Mr. Rushdie, born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence – raised by a family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals, wealthy, progressive and cultured – had set part of the Muslim world ablaze with the publication of the satanic versesleading Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini to issue a “fatwa” in 1989 calling for his assassination.
The author had therefore been forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache.
He has to face an immense loneliness, increased by the break with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, to whom “Les verses…” is dedicated.
Living discreetly in New York, Salman Rushdie – arched eyebrows, heavy eyelids, bald head, glasses and beard – had resumed a more or less normal life while continuing to defend, in his books, satire and irreverence.
But the “fatwa” was never lifted and many of the translators of his book were injured by attacks, even killed, such as the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, victim of several stab wounds in 1991.
“Thirty years have passed,” he said, however, in the fall of 2018. “Now everything is fine. I was 41 at the time (of the fatwa), I’m 71 now. We live in a world where issues of concern change very quickly. There are now many other reasons to be afraid, other people to kill…”.
Knighted in 2007 by the Queen of England, to the great displeasure of Muslim extremists, this master of magical realism, a man of immense culture who calls himself apolitical, has written in English some fifteen novels, stories for young people, short stories and trials.
Macron and Johnson condemn
“His fight is ours, universal”, launched French President Emmanuel Macron on Twitter, ensuring that he was “today, more than ever, by his side”.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also said he was “appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right that we should never stop defending”, referring to freedom of expression.
The association for the defense of writers in the world, PEN America, also declared itself “shocked and horrified” by revealing that Friday morning Mr. Rushdie had offered them his “help for Ukrainian writers”.
For her part, Governor Hochul hailed “someone who has spent decades telling the truth to the powerful […] who fearlessly exposed himself despite the threats that haunted him throughout his adult life.