MAYVILLE, N.Y. — Author Salman Rushdie has been taken off a ventilator and is able to talk, a day after being stabbed as he prepared to give a lecture.
Rushdie's agent confirmed information contained in a tweet by another author Saturday. Earlier in the day, the man accused in the attack in upstate New York pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges.
A judge ordered Hadi Matar held without bail after the district attorney told her Matar took steps to purposely put himself in position to harm Rushdie.
Rushdie, the renowned author of “The Satanic Verses” remains hospitalized with serious injuries.
Iranians are reacting with praise and worry over the attack on novelist Salman Rushdie - the target of a decades-old fatwa by the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for his death.
It remains unclear why Rushdie’s attacker, identified by police as Hadi Matar of Fairview, New Jersey, stabbed the author as he prepared to speak at an event Friday in western New York.
Iran’s theocratic government and its state-run media have assigned no motive to the assault as well. But in Tehran, some willing to speak to The Associated Press offered praise for an attack targeting a writer they believe tarnished the Islamic faith with his 1988 book “The Satanic Verses.”
