Salman Rushdie remains on a ventilator after being stabbed during a New York performance

British writer Salman Rushdie75, has been the subject of a knife attack during a presentation in upstate New York, and has been rushed to hospital, as confirmed by the New York Police Department in a statement.

The 75-year-old former Booker Prize winner was speaking at a Chautauqua Institution event when a person approached him and managed to knock him down.

As soon as the writer’s presentation began, and always according to witnesses, a person in a black mask jumped on stage and attacked Rushdie.

According to the latest police report, Rushdie has a… stiches at least one time in the neck and one in the abdomenThat’s why he entered the operating room. There he receives assisted respiration, because he cannot breathe on his own.

“The news is not good (…) Salman probably will lose an eye. The nerves in his arm have been amputated and his liver has been stabbed and damaged,” the writer’s agent Andrew Wylie told Reuters. New York Times.

Police have taken the suspect into custody and identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old resident of New Jersey. However, the motive for the attack has not yet been determined, according to police sources. Washington Post.

On the other hand, Rushdie’s interviewer suffered a minor head injury during the event, although he has since been released.

Rushdie intervened in a debate over the cities that offer asylum to persecuted writers, as can be seen in the organization’s program City of Asylum.

Rushdie’s conference — which the organization says isn’t the first he’s held there — was titled “More Than Shelter” and was supposed to be about the character of the United States “as a land of asylum and home to freedom of creative expression.”

Rushdie, of Indian descent (born in Bombay), currently holds dual British and American citizenships and has lived in the United States since 2000.

The writer has always criticized the governments of the countries in which he has lived and religious extremism in his writings.

“I never thought of myself as a writer dealing with religion until a religion started persecuting me,” he says in his article The Problem of Religion, adding that the problem lies not only in Islamic fundamentalism but also in fanaticism. , embodied in the figure of Tony Blair and in the US government George W. Bush.

the publication of the Devil’s versesin 1988, caused an immediate controversy in the Muslim world over the alleged irreverence with which the figure of the Prophet Muhammad is treated.

India banned the book on October 5 and South Africa on Nov 24. After several weeks, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Bangladesh, Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Qatar they had also banned the novel.

Iran He considers it blasphemous and the then Supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a decree in 1989 calling for the writer’s death. The Iranian government eventually distanced itself from Khomeini’s “fatwa,” but in 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation increased Rushdie’s pay from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.

Rushdie is alive because a police officer rescued him, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has said. Two hours after the attack, the governor appeared before the media to confirm that “he is still alive” and that he is “being cared for according to his needs”.

“It was a state police officer who stood up and saved his life, protecting him and the moderator (of the conference),” Hochul said.

“The attack on Salman Rushdie in New York is cowardly. This is the result of hate campaigns systematically carried out by fanatics and radicalization of ordinary people,” he wrote on Twitter. Tushar Gandhigreat-grandson of Indian peace leader Mahatma Gandhi.