August 13
Author Salman Rushdie may lose an eye, have his liver severely damaged, and have nerves in his arm severed, according to his agent. His agent, Andrew Wylie, recently wrote an email, “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed, and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”
On Friday, while the controversial author was bracing up himself to address an event organized by the Chautauqua Institution, Rushdie was pushed by an unknown assailant on the stage and was stabbed in his neck.
Though his immediate condition wasn’t revealed by the State Police, he was flown to a nearby hospital from a remote educational & spiritual center in Chautauqua which is about 550 km away from New York City.
As per the statement given by an immediate eyewitness to The Daily Beast, “The attacker was heavy set and was wearing a black head covering.” The witness, Ward Pautler, said that he thought the attacker was “punching Rushdie, but then I realized he was stabbing him”. The attacker was taken into custody by a state police trooper who was present at the spot, police said.
The author who has a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head was ironically part of an event where the theme was on “discussion of the United States as an asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression”. (Source: Organisation’s Website)
The author has been on the hit list of many Islamic Militant organizations since the publication of a novel written by him named “Satanic Verses” in 1989, which some Muslims considered blasphemous, the then Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. He has been subject to many former assassination attempts by famous terror organizations.
Although ‘Midnight’s Children,’ which Salman Rushdie wrote in 1981 and which won the Booker Prize, catapulted him into the public eye, it was ‘The Satanic Verses’ that truly brought his name into the public consciousness on a global scale.
