Author Salman Rushdie was stabbed during a speech in western New York on Friday morning and rushed to a hospital for treatment. Governor Kathy Hochul said at an afternoon event that he is alive and credited a state trooper with saving him.
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Rushdie, who has long faced death threats over his writing, was about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua when a man rushed the stage and attacked him, the Associated Press reports.
The assailant, who has not been identified, was subdued and detained by police. Rushdie, 75, was airlifted to a nearby hospital, according to a statement by state police that said the author had been stabbed in the neck.
The attack began at approximately 10:45 a.m. as Rushdie and co-speaker Henry Reese were preparing to speak from the stage of the amphitheater, according to eyewitness Charlie Savenor, who was seated about 50 feet away. “Within about 15 seconds, someone jumped onstage and began to pound Mr. Rushdie,” Savenor said. The assailant repeatedly struck the author. “I saw the arm go up and down.”
The attacker “did not say anything,” Savenor added.
Blood could be seen splattered behind the spot where Rushdie was attacked.
Another witness told the New York Times that Rushdie had been stabbed multiple times:
Rita Landman, an endocrinologist who was in the audience and offered assistance, said that Mr. Rushdie had multiple stab wounds, including one to the right side of his neck, and that there was a pool of blood under his body. But she said he appeared to be alive and was not receiving CPR. “People were saying, ‘He has a pulse, he has a pulse he has a pulse,’” Ms. Landman said.
“Rushdie was quickly surrounded by a small group of people who held up his legs, presumably to send more blood to his chest,” the AP reported, before he was taken to a hospital by helicopter. Reese, the co-founder of the Pittsburgh nonprofit City of Asylum, suffered a minor head wound, according to police.
Rushdie and Reese had been invited to speak at “a discussion of the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression,” according to the Chautauqua Institution’s website.
Rushdie, 75, has received multiple death threats during his writing career, including a 1989 fatwa called for by the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini over Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which many Muslims considered blasphemous. In 2012, a religious foundation in Iran offered more than $3 million for Rushdie’s death.
The fatwa also applied to anyone involved in publishing the book. In 1991, two translators of The Satanic Verses were attacked: Its Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed and killed in his office, while the Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was attacked and stabbed in his home but survived.
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