USA. Writer Salman Rushdie attacked. New information about the writer’s health

Earlier on Saturday, 24-year-old Hadi Matar, accused of attacking Rushdie, refused to plead guilty to the charges of attempted murder and attack during a preliminary court hearing. The prosecutor accused him of having committed “a pre-planned crime”.

Matar appeared in court wearing a white mask over his face and in handcuffs. The judge ordered him to be arrested without the possibility of bail.

Defendant’s defense attorney, Nathaniel Barone, complained about the slowness of the authorities, which he said “had delayed too long bringing Matar to trial, keeping him handcuffed at the police station.” “He does have the constitutional right to be presumed innocent,” he argued.

The 75-year-old writer was hospitalized on board a helicopter. He underwent many hours of surgery in the facility. According to his agent, Andrew Wylie, Salman Rushdie suffered liver damage and rupture of nerve fibers in his arm and eye as a result of the attack. He added that he might also lose an eye.

On Saturday night, Wylie told the Associated Press that Rushdie had been disconnected from the ventilator, was breathing on his own, and was able to talk.

Earlier a friend of the writer, also a writer, Aatish Taseer, tweeted that Rushdie “has already got rid of the respirator, he is talking and joking.” After a while, however, Taseer removed this tweet.

The attack on Rushdie, the author of many famous works, including the controversial “Satanic Verses” for which he was sentenced to death by Islamic fundamentalists (fatwa), shocked and was condemned by famous personalities around the world, including the US President Joe Biden.

The attack was also condemned by the Muslim Council of Great Britain (MCB), as well as the writers’ association PEN International, writers Stephen King and JK Rowling, and cookbook author Nigella Lawson, a longtime friend of Rushdie’s privately.

In 1998, the then government Iran announced that he was no longer supporting the fatwa, which in recent years has enabled the writer to return to a more normal life. Fatwa, however, has never been canceled. Many translators of his books fell victim to attacks, and one of them, the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, was killed in 1991 from dagger wounds.

In 2012, Rushdie published the autobiographical novel “Joseph Anton”, in which he described the compulsion to hide due to the death threat hanging over him.