His agent specified to the Spanish daily “El Pais” that the British author suffered from fifteen breast injuries and torso, and three others on the neck. “[But Mr. Rushdie] will live,” he added, without specifying if the writer was still hospitalized.
Le Monde with AFP
More than two months after being violently attacked in the United States, Salman Rushdie has notably lost the use of an eye and one hand, said his agent, Andrew Wylie, at the Spanish daily El Pais . This is the first news communicated since the British writer was hospitalized, in mid-August.
“He lost his sight of an eye. (…) He had three serious injuries on the neck. He is handicapped with one hand, because the nerves of his arm were cut. And he has about fifteen Wounds in the chest and chest, “said Wylie to El Pais in an interview published this weekend.
“His injuries were very deep. (…) It was a brutal attack.” “[But] he will live,” he added, without specifying if Mr. Rushdie was still in the hospital . On August 12, Salman Rushdie was preparing to speak at a conference in the northern New York State when a man burst on stage and stabbed him several times, in particular the neck and the abdomen. Evacuated by helicopter to a hospital, the author of the Satanic verses had to be briefly placed under respirator before his condition improves.
in a fatwa since 1989
The main suspect, Hadi Matar, an American of Lebanese origin then aged 24, was arrested immediately after the facts. During his trial, which opened in mid-August before a court in Mayville, in New York State, he pleaded not guilty.
The attack had been greeted by extremists from Muslim countries like Iran or Pakistan. The novel Les Versets Satanique has been prohibited in Iran since 1988, because many Muslims consider it blasphemous. The following year, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeyni, supreme guide of the Islamic revolution from 1979 to 1989, launched, on February 14, 1989, a fatwa (religious decree) calling all Muslims to kill the British author, restrictive The latter to live in hiding and under police protection. A fatwa which Salman Rushdie said, in 2005, that it had formed a prelude to the September 11 attacks.
Salman Rushdie, born in 1947 in Bombay, India, two months before the country obtained its independence from the British Empire, was raised by a family of non -practicing, rich, progressive and cultivated Muslim intellectuals. The writer regrets being reduced to the scandal caused by the publication of Satanic verses. “My problem is that people continue to perceive me under the only prism of the” fatwa “”, said, a few years ago, this free-thinker who wishes to be considered as a writer, and not as The symbol of the fight against religious obscurantism and for freedom of expression.