Salman Rushdie off ventilator
NEW YORK - Author Salman Rushdie was taken off a ventilator and was able to talk Saturday, a day after he was stabbed repeatedly as he prepared to give a lecture in upState New York.
Rushdie remained hospitalised with serious injuries, but fellow author Aatish Taseer tweeted in the evening that he was ‘off the ventilator and talking (and joking).’
Taseer later deleted his tweet, but Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, told the Associated Press that the information Taseer shared was correct, without offering further details.
Rushdie suffered severe injuries in the attack, with Wylie previously saying the author suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm, and that he would likely lose an eye. Earlier in the day, the man accused of attacking him Friday at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat center, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges in what a prosecutor called a ‘preplanned’ crime.
An attorney for Hadi Matar entered the plea on his behalf during an arraignment in western New York. The suspect appeared in court wearing a black and white jumpsuit and a white face mask, with his hands cuffed in front of him.
A judge ordered him held without bail after District Attorney Jason Schmidt told her Matar, (24), took steps to purposely put himself in position to harm Rushdie, getting an advance pass to the event where the author was speaking and arriving a day early bearing a fake ID. Meanwhile a physician who witnessed the stabbing of Salman Rushdie at an event in western New York said that despite the presence of two cops who were acting as security, it was the crowd that ultimately stepped in to subdue the attacker.
‘‘The audience subdued the assailant and the state patrolmen quickly then handcuffed him,’’ Dr Martin Haskell of Dayton, Ohio, told DailyMail. com. Haskell said Rushdie had both the State trooper and another sheriff’s deputy nearby acting as security for the event - but that the knife-wielding assailant still seemed to run onto the stage unobstructed.
It’s unclear where the officers were standing when the stabbing occurred. A Spokesman for the New York State Police said the trooper and deputy were assigned ‘to provide security at the event at the request of the Chautauqua Institution.’