The man accused of stabbing author Salman Rushdie at a literary event pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges on Saturday, as the severely injured author appeared to show signs of improvement.
Hadi Matar, 24, was arraigned in a court in New York state, with prosecutors outlining how Rushdie had been stabbed about 10 times in what they described as a planned, premeditated assault.
After the on-stage attack on Friday, Rushdie was helicoptered to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, and underwent emergency surgery.
Photo: AFP
His agent, Andrew Wylie, had said the writer was on a ventilator and in danger of losing an eye, but in an update on Saturday told the New York Times that Rushdie had started to talk again, suggesting his condition had improved.
Author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children, Rushdie had lived in hiding for years after Iran’s first supreme leader, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered his killing.
While Friday’s stabbing triggered international outrage, it also drew applause from Islamist hardliners in Iran and Pakistan.
US President Joe Biden on Saturday called it a “vicious” attack and offered prayers for Rushdie’s recovery.
“Salman Rushdie — with his insight into humanity, with his unmatched sense for story, with his refusal to be intimidated or silenced — stands for essential, universal ideals: Truth, courage, resilience,” Biden said in a statement.
Matar is being held without bail and has been charged with second-degree attempted murder and assault with a weapon. Police provided no information on his background or what might have motivated him.
The 75-year-old novelist had been living under an effective death sentence since 1989 when Khomeini issued a religious decree, or fatwa, ordering Muslims to kill the writer.
The fatwa followed the publication of The Satanic Verses, which enraged some Muslims who said it was blasphemous for its portrayal of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.
In an interview with Germany’s Stern magazine about two weeks ago, Rushdie spoke of how, after so many years living with death threats, his life was “getting back to normal.”
“For whatever it was, eight or nine years, it was quite serious,” he told a Stern correspondent in New York. “But ever since I’ve been living in America, since the year 2000, really there hasn’t been a problem in all that time.”
Rushdie moved to New York in the early 2000s and became a US citizen in 2016. Despite the continued threat to his life, he was increasingly seen in public — often without noticeable security.
Security was not particularly tight at Friday’s event at the Chautauqua Institution, which hosts arts programs in a lakeside community near Buffalo, New York.
Witnesses said Rushdie was seated on stage and preparing to speak when Matar sprang up from the audience and managed to stab him before being wrestled to the ground by staff and other spectators.
The Satanic Verses and its author remain deeply inflammatory in Iran. When asked on Saturday, nobody in Tehran’s main book market dared to openly condemn the stabbing.
“I was very happy to hear the news,” said Mehrab Bigdeli, a man in his 50s studying to become a Muslim cleric.
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