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Salman Rushdie lost the sight in one eye and the use of one hand after an attack on stage at a New York literary event in August, his agent said.
Andrew Wylie, representing such literary giants as Saul Bellow and Roberto Bolano, described the extent of Rushdie’s injuries sustained in the “brutal” attack in an interview with the Spanish daily El Pais.
Mr. Wylie described the author’s injuries as “profound” and noted loss of vision in one eye.
“He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut. And he has about 15 more wounds in his chest and torso,” he said, reported RTE.
The agent declined to say whether the 75-year-old “The Satanic Verses” author was still in hospital more than two months after the attack.
A 24-year-old New Jersey man, Hadi Matar, is accused of stabbing the writer in the neck and torso shortly before he was to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, a shelter about 12 miles from Lake Erie.
The novelist was rushed to hospital after sustaining serious injuries in the attack, Wylie said at the time.
The attack came 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s then-paramount leader, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to assassinate Rushdie a few months after the publication of “The Satanic Verses.”
Some Muslims viewed the novel’s passages about the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous.
Rushdie, born in India to a Kashmiri Muslim family, lived with a bounty on his head and spent nine years in hiding under the protection of British police.
As President Mohammad Khatami’s pro-reform Iranian government distanced itself from the fatwa in the late 1990s, the multimillion-dollar bounty hanging on Mr. Rushdie’s head continued to grow and the fatwa was never lifted.
Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was suspended from Twitter in 2019 for saying the fatwa against Rushdie was “irrevocable.”
Mr. Matar, the man accused of assaulting the novelist, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and assault.
He is being held without bail in a western New York prison.
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