Rushdie showing signs of recovery after stabbing
NEW YORK: Salman Rushdie had been taken off his ventilator and was talking yesterday as he recovered from being stabbed a day earlier in the United States.
BritishAmerican writer Aatish Taseer said, in a sincedeleted tweet, the 75yearold was ‘‘off the ventilator and talking (and joking)’’, which was then confirmed by the author’s agent Andrew Wylie.
Wylie had earlier said Rushdie was using the ventilator and could lose an eye after he sustained injuries to his arm and liver in the attack.
The Indianborn Briton, whose novel The Satanic Verses led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was about to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state when he was attacked.
The man accused of stabbing him pleaded not guilty yesterday to charges of attempted murder and assault, in what a prosecutor called a ‘‘preplanned’’ crime.
A lawyer for Hadi Matar (24) entered the plea on his behalf during a formal hearing at a court in western New York.
A judge ordered Matar to be held without bail after district attorney Jason Schmidt told her he took steps to purposely put himself in a position to harm Rushdie, getting an advance pass to the event where the author was speaking and arriving a day early with a fake ID.
Public defender Nathaniel Barone said authorities had taken too long to get Matar in front of a judge, while leaving him ‘‘hooked up to a bench at the state police barracks’’.
‘‘He has that constitutional right of presumed innocence,’’ Barone said.
Rushdie was stabbed at least once in the neck and once in the abdomen, according to police, before he was taken to hospital. His publisher Penguin Random House said it was ‘‘deeply shocked and appalled’’ by the incident.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was ‘‘appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie has been stabbed while exercising a right we should never cease to defend’’.
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer said ‘‘Salman Rushdie has long embodied the struggle for liberty and freedom against those who seek to destroy them’’.
‘‘This cowardly attack on him . . . is an attack on those values.’’
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said ‘‘the country and the world witnessed a reprehensible attack against the writer Salman Rushdie. This act of violence is appalling’’.
Rushdie began his writing career in the early 1970s with two unsuccessful books before Midnight’s Children, about the birth of India, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.
The author lived in hiding for many years in London under a British government protection programme after the fatwa.
In 1998, the Iranian government withdrew its support for the death sentence and Rushdie gradually returned to public life. — BPA