NEW YORK, Aug 14 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Salman Rushdie has been taken off a ventilator and is now able to talk, a friend and his agent said, a day after the acclaimed novelist was stabbed as he prepared to give a lecture in New York.
Rushdie, 75, remained hospitalised with serious injuries on Saturday, but fellow author Aatish Taseer tweeted in the evening that he was “off the ventilator and talking (and joking)”.
Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, confirmed that information without offering further details.
Earlier in the day, the man accused of attacking him on Friday at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat centre, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges in what a prosecutor called a “preplanned” crime.
A lawyer for the suspect, Hadi Matar, entered the plea on his behalf during an arraignment in western New York.
A judge ordered him held without bail after District Attorney Jason Schmidt told her that Matar, 24, took steps to purposely put himself in a position to harm Rushdie, getting an advance pass to the event where the author was speaking and arriving a day early bearing a fake ID.
“This was a targeted, unprovoked, preplanned attack on Mr Rushdie,” Schmidt said.
Rushdie – who for more than 30 years has faced death threats for his book “The Satanic Verses” – was stabbed 10 times, prosecutors said during Matar’s arraignment.
The novelist suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, Wylie said on Friday evening. He was likely to lose the injured eye.
Neither local nor federal authorities offered any additional details on the investigation on Saturday. Police said on Friday they had not established a motive for the attack. — NNN-AGENCIES
