Novelist Salman Rushdie on ventilator after stabbing

New Delhi: Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist was stabbed in the neck and torso onstage at a lecture in New York state is in ventilator support.

After hours of surgery, Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to speak on Friday evening after an attack condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on the freedom of expression.

“The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie, his book agent, wrote in an email. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in  arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”

Rushdie, 75, was being introduced to give a talk to an audience of hundreds on artistic freedom at western New York’s Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist, who has lived with a bounty on his head since the late 1980s.

A New York State Police trooper providing security at the event arrested the attacker. Police identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who bought a pass to the event.

Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, , before moving to the United Kingdom, has long faced death threats for his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses.”  (INDIA NEWS STREAM)