emergency operation
Immediately after his attack, on the stage of an amphitheater at a cultural center in Chautauqua, in upstate New York, Salman Rushdie was transported by helicopter to the nearest hospital where he was operated on urgently, New York State Police Major Eugene Staniszewski told reporters.
Shortly before 11 a.m. (3 p.m. GMT), “a suspect rushed onto the stage (of the amphitheater) and attacked Salman Rushdie and the interviewer” by “stabbing” the writer “in the neck”, had very quickly announced the police, who said Friday evening that Salman Rushdie had also been stabbed “in the abdomen”.
The attacker was immediately arrested and taken into custody, with Officer Staniszewski revealing his name was Hadi Matar, 24, from New Jersey.
“Killing Salman Rushdie”
Salman Rushdie, born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence had set part of the Muslim world ablaze with the publication of the “Satanic Verses”, leading the Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini to issue in 1989 a ” fatwa” calling for his assassination.
The author had therefore been forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache. Living discreetly in New York, Salman Rushdie had resumed a more or less normal life while continuing to defend, in his books, satire and irreverence.
Fatwa never lifted
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…”.
The assailant praised by the Iranian press
Iran’s main ultra-conservative daily, Kayhan, congratulated the man who stabbed the novelist on Saturday. “Congratulations to this courageous and duty-conscious man who attacked the apostate and the vicious Salman Rushdie”, writes the newspaper, whose boss is appointed by the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.