“Salman Rushdie was disconnected from the respirator and speaks!” “, Wrote on Twitter Michael Hill, the president of the Chautauqua institution, where the attack took place.
The author is hospitalized in a hospital in Erié, Pennsylvania, by the lake that separates the United States from Canada, after being attacked last Friday, August 12, 2022, with 12 stabs by Hadi Matar.
This one, born in California and of Lebanese origin, moved in 2014 to Fairview, New Jersey. He is presented as a Shiite Muslim, of Khomeynist obedience.
Matar was presented, that same day, to a New York State judge, before which his lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, pleaded “not guilty” of “attempted murder”. The accused did not say a word, according to local media present at the hearing.
In court, the prosecutors declared that the attack on the author was “premeditated and targeted”. His next appearance in court is scheduled for Friday August 19 at 3 p.m.
Threatened with death since an Iran’s “fatwa” in 1989, a year after the publication of “Satanic verses”, Salman Rushdie had long been forced to live in hiding and police protection, ranging from cache cache.
Many translators in his book were injured by attacks, or even killed, such as the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, victim of several stabs in 1991.
Living in New York for 20 years, he had resumed an almost normal life while continuing to defend, in his books, satire and irreverence.
