Author Salman Rushdie was taken off a ventilator and able to talk, his agent Andrew Wylie told CNBC on Saturday. Rushdie was stabbed multiple times on Friday as he prepared to give a lecture in upstate New York. The author of Satanic Verses remains hospitalized with serious injuries.
Hadi Matar, the man who attacked Rushdie pleaded not guilty on Saturday. Matar's attorney made the plea on his behalf during an arraignment in western New York. The attack took place on Friday at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat centre. 24-year-old Matar was to be held without bail after District Attorney Jason Schmidt told the judge that Matar attained a pass in advance for the lecture and purposefully positioned himself to attack Rushdie. Matar pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges. The prosecutor in the meantime called it a 'preplanned' crime.
75-year-old Rushdie suffers a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye. The author who has faced death threats for the book Satanic Verses has been flooded with tributes and messages of praise. Satanic verses, published in 1988, drew the ire of the Muslim community. Muslims regarded a dream sequence based on the life of the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous among other objections. Rushdie’s book had already been banned and burned in India, Pakistan and elsewhere before Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah, Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989.
