Album The attack on Salman Rushdie, in pictures
Salman Rushdie
, one of the world's most relevant and influential writers, has been
stabbed in the neck
.
The attack occurred as Rushdie was about to participate in an event at the Chautauqua Institution, a New York State cultural organization located about a seven-hour drive from the city, where Rushdie lives.
Rushdie, who turned 75 in July, is in serious health
.
His agent, Andrew Wylie, has commented that the news is not good, since he is connected to a respirator.
"Salman is likely to
lose an eye; the nerves in his arm are severed and his liver is badly damaged
," as reported by 'The New York Times' Juliana Barbassa.
The writer was evacuated by helicopter, while the assailant, a dark-skinned young man wearing a T-shirt, was arrested on the spot.
Some media announced that it is
Hadi Matar, 24 years old and a resident of New Jersey
.
The person who was going to interview Salman Rushdie also suffered minor head injuries in the attack.
The existence of stab wounds had been advanced to 'The New York Times' by the endocrinologist Rita Landman, one of the people who urgently treated Rushdie at the scene.
According to her testimony,
he had several wounds, one on his neck, he was lying in a pool of blood and seemed to be alive
because other people perceived that he had a pulse.
According to witnesses cited by the US press, Rushdie was stabbed "repeatedly, intensely" at 11 am, when the event was about to begin.
Stacey Losse, present in the auditorium, has specified
an AP who was stabbed "six to eight times."
Another witness, Valerie Haskell, has told the same agency that up to twenty people immediately went up on stage and managed to contain the aggressor.
At the same time, some doctors who were in the audience assisted
the writer until the arrival of the emergency services.
"A state police officer stood up and saved his life, protected him and the moderator
," New York Governor Kathy Hochul said.
The conversation in which Rushdie was to participate was part of the Chautauqua Institution's series of conferences, which each summer organizes a series of meetings with some of the most important people in the world in the fields of culture, art, science and politics.
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Whoever assassinates Rushdie is entitled to
a reward of three million dollars (2.9 million euros)
offered by the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1989 and increased in 2016. The loot for the writer's head is a consequence of the death sentence issued against him for "blasphemy" by Iran's then top leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.
The reason, the work
The satanic verses
.
One of the novel's translators was assassinated by Muslim fanatics, and most of the publishers that published the book hid his name from the cover for fear of terrorist attacks.
The man arrested as the alleged attacker of Salman Rushdie.Charles Fox |
AP
Rushdie thus became a fugitive from international Islamism
for several years,
experimenting under the protection of the British secret services (who were repeatedly driven insane by their propensity to flirt).
Five years ago, the writer declared to EL MUNDO that "the Nobel Prize will never cross my path... as far as we all know"
, in reference to Iran's death sentence.
The highest leader of that country, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has reiterated that the sentence against Rushdie remains in force.
Since the publication of
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie has been forced to live in hiding or protected by bodyguards.
Paradox of paradoxes, who was going to interview him is
Henry Reese,
the founder of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, an organization that gives refuge to persecuted artists and intellectuals around the world.
Salman Rushdie, in 2017. Grant Pollard AP
Although the motivations of the alleged aggressor are not known, it is impossible not to think of Tehran's death sentence, which made Rushdie
a symbol of freedom of expression and thought in liberal democracies.
If the religious nature of the action is confirmed, it could have political and strategic consequences given that the US and Iran are currently negotiating a nuclear treaty for the Islamic Republic to renounce the manufacture of atomic bombs for several decades.
A similar agreement was already reached in 2015, but Donald Trump broke it two and a half years later, which
brought
Iran back into the atomic race.
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