The hit man Hadi M.* (24) stormed onto a stage in New York two months ago and stabbed the writer Salman Rushdie (75) several times. He was taken to hospital with serious injuries, but survived the attack. Rushdie has not appeared in public since, nor has he commented on the assassination attempt.
Now his agent Andrew Wylie has revealed the consequences of the knife wounds in an interview with the Spanish newspaper “El Pais”: Rushdie has lost his sight in one eye and he can no longer use his hand because the stitches have severed his nerves.
‘It was a brutal attack’
Wylie added: “He has about 15 other wounds in his chest and upper body. It was a brutal attack.” Wylie won’t say where Rushdie is. “He’ll survive, that’s the main thing.” Rushdie has been living with constant threats to his life for years.
His agent also reveals this in an interview: he often spoke with Rushdie about the possibility of such an attack. “The greatest danger he has faced so many years after the fatwa was imposed is that a random person will appear out of nowhere and attack him. You cannot guard against this because it is completely unexpected and illogical. It was like the murder of John Lennon.”
After the trip the essence changed
The killer has been incarcerated since the attack. He gave no information about his motive. Only like this: «I respect the Ayatollah. I think he’s a great person. I don’t want to say more about it.” He also said that he had read “a few pages” of Rushdie’s novel.
The Rushdie attacker’s mother confirmed that her son returned from a trip to the Middle East in 2018 with a changed personality and increasingly focused on the Islamic faith.
Born in 1947 in Mumbai, India, Rushdie has faced death threats for decades. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa — a religious directive — calling on all Muslims to kill the writer. The reason was the alleged insult to the prophet Mohammed in Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which had been published a year earlier. (neo)
*Name known