The Chautauqua summer season arts competition in upstate New York is generally a peaceful and nice affair, drawing hundreds of literary-minded individuals desirous to commune with their favourite writers.
That modified dramatically on Friday, when the famed novelist Salman Rushdie, who had simply walked on to a stage to offer a lecture, was stabbed by a person wielding a knife – reworking the faculty-lounge ambiance right into a blood-spattered scene.
The stunning occasions unfolded in seconds and shocked onlookers.
Rushdie, who has been focused for loss of life over accusations that his prize-winning 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is blasphemous, was sitting in a chair on the stage as a panelist launched him and his work. A person wearing black rushed the stage and attacked Rushdie.
“I may simply see his fists type of pounding on Salman,” a witness, Invoice Vasu, told the New York Occasions.
As members of the viewers screamed, individuals ran to deal with the attacker and render help to Rushdie, who had been apparently stabbed a number of instances, together with within the neck. Rushdie lay face up on the ground, as somebody elevated his legs. He was “lined with blood and there was blood operating down on to the ground” as individuals crouched over him saying, “He has a pulse, he has a pulse,” two different witnesses informed the Occasions.
A state police officer on the occasion instantly arrested the person, who has not but been publicly named.
Later, six individuals bore Rushdie by stretcher throughout a grassy garden to a ready medevac helicopter, which flew him to a close-by hospital. His situation is unknown, although his agent, Andrew Wylie, has said Rushdie was in surgical procedure.
Based on the competition’s itinerary, Rushdie was planning to debate the US’s position as an “asylum for writers and different artists in exile and as a house for freedom of artistic expression”.
He was accompanied on the stage by Henry Reese, the co-founder of a residency program for writers dwelling in exile beneath risk of persecution. Reese reportedly suffered a minor head damage.
A member of the Chautauqua workers requested the viewers to calmly evacuate the 4,000-person auditorium. Shortly thereafter the competition canceled all occasions for the day.
In 1989, the then supreme chief of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared that Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses – which included speculative sequences concerning the early lifetime of the prophet Muhammad – was blasphemous, and referred to as for Rushdie’s loss of life. The ebook was banned in lots of international locations.
Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai after which labored in Britain, was compelled into hiding. He lived for a time beneath an assumed identify and police safety. A number of assassination makes an attempt had been made towards individuals related to the publication of the ebook. In 1991, a person stabbed Rushdie’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, to loss of life in Tokyo.
Rushdie moved to New York in 2000.
