After being attacked at an event here on Friday, Salman Rushdie suffered multiple wounds, including one on the right side of his neck, and was covered in blood all over his body, according to a doctor helping the Mumbai-born controversial. The author after the brutal attack.
New York police said Rushdie was attacked and stabbed in the neck on Friday during a stage in Chautauqua, western New York.
“Rita Landman, an endocrinologist who was in the audience, went on stage to offer assistance after the conversation. She said that Mr. Rushdie had multiple wounds, including a right side of his neck, and that there was a pool of his body. But he said he appeared to be alive and was not receiving CPR,” The New York Times reported.
“People were saying, ‘He has a pulse, he has a pulse, he has a pulse,'” Landman was quoted as saying in the report.
Rushdie, who won the Booker Prize for his novel Midnight’s Children, was seen on stage with blood in his hands. The audience confronted the attacker and Rushdie was treated on stage after the attack.
“State police are investigating an attack on writer Salman Rushdie ahead of a speech event at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY. At around 11 a.m. on August 12, 2022, a male suspect ran onto the stage and attacked Rushdie and an interviewer, New York Police said in a statement.
David Graves, 78, who sat in the center of the amphitheater, said Rushdie was still sitting when the attacker reached the stage and attacked him.
“Things unfolded within seconds,” he told the New York Times. Roger Warner of Cleveland, Ohio, was sitting in the front row of the amphitheater with his wife when Rushdie was attacked.
Warner said he saw a tall, skinny man leap onto the stage from the left and start attacking Salman Rushdie. He felt that the man had punched Rushdie in the face three or four times. Then he saw blood.
“He was covered in blood and was bleeding on the floor. I saw blood around his eyes and ran down his cheek,” Warner was quoted as saying in the report.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights group, said he was concerned that people might blame Muslims or Islam for stabbing before the attacker’s identity or motive was publicly known. Huh. “American Muslims, like all Americans, condemn any violence that targets anyone in our society,” he said.
New York State Police said a suspect was arrested from the scene and is in custody.
Rushdie, the author of 14 novels, was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.