Salman Rushdie, the author, was attacked Friday while onstage in Chautauqua, near Erie in western New York, according to multiple eyewitnesses and social media accounts.
The attack occurred at about 10:45 a.m., shortly after Mr. Rushdie took the stage to give a talk at the Chautauqua Institution, a western New York community that offers arts and literary programming during the summer.
mr. Rushdie had just entered the stage and was sitting in a chair when an employee introduced him, when the attacker stormed onto the stage and attacked the author. It was not immediately clear whether Mr Rushdie had been injured.
Rushdie spent about 10 years under police protection and lived in hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader after the 1979 Iranian revolution, called for his execution in 1989 because his novel “The Satanic Verses” was deemed offensive to Islam. The book was banned in India, where he was born, and he was sent out of the country for over ten years.
“There was only one attacker,” 75-year-old Elisabeth Healey said in the audience. “He was dressed in black. He was wearing a loose black robe. He ran towards him at lightning speed.”
Multiple witnesses said the attacker could easily reach Mr Rushdie by running up the stage and approaching him from behind.
Several onlookers said they were surprised by how easily attacker Mr. Rushdie reached.
“There was a huge security flaw,” said John Bulette, 85, who witnessed the attack. “That someone could get so close without any intervention was terrifying.”
“The Satanic Verses” was considered blasphemous by some Muslims because it made a part of the life of the Prophet Muhammad fictitious. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989 ordering Muslims to kill Mr Rushdie.
The Iranian government publicly supported the fatwa for 10 years, until at least 1998, when Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said Iran no longer supported the assassination. But the fatwa remains in effect, reportedly tied to a bounty from a semi-official Iranian religious foundation of about $3.3 million as of 2012.
That year, Mr Rushdie published a memoir, ‘Joseph Anton’, on the fatwa. The title came from the pseudonym he used during his hiding place.