The suspect has been identified as Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, State Police Commander Maj. Eugene Staniszewski said at a news conference Friday night. Police said they have no indication of a motive at this time, but are working with the FBI and local authorities to determine what may have motivated the attack.
Authorities are also working to obtain search warrants for several items found at the scene, including a backpack and electronic devices, Staniszewski said. Authorities believe the suspect was alone, but are investigating “to make sure that’s the case,” Staniszewski added.
The suspect jumped on stage and stabbed Rushdie at least once in the neck and at least once in the abdomen, state police said. Staff members and members of the public tackled the suspect and put him on the ground before a state trooper took the assaulted man into custody, police said.
The suspect had “a pass to access the grounds,” Dr. Michael E. Hill, president of the Chautauqua institution, said at the press conference.
Rushdie was airlifted from a field near the site — in a rural lake resort about 70 miles south of Buffalo — to a hospital. The interviewer also suffered a minor head injury, police said.
Rushdie is undergoing surgery, police said Friday night.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told reporters Friday that Rushdie is “alive” and “getting the care he needs.” She said a state trooper “stepped up and saved his life and protected him and the moderator who was also attacked.
“Here’s a man who spent decades speaking truth to power,” the governor said of Rushdie. “Someone who has been there without fear, despite the threats that have followed him throughout his adult life, it seems.”
Rushdie was introduced around 10:45 a.m. when the attack happened, according to a witness who said he heard screams from the audience. He said a man in a black shirt appeared to be “hitting” the author. The witness, who was 25 meters from the scene, did not hear the attacker say anything, nor did he see a weapon.
Some people in the audience ran to help and others went after the attacker, the witness said.
Another witness told CNN there were no security searches or metal detectors at the event. The witnesses are not being identified because they have expressed concerns for their personal safety.
The witness said the attacker “walked quickly” down the aisle and jumped onto the stage, approaching the author and “repeatedly making stabbing motions with his hand.”
A third witness, a longtime Chautauqua resident who spoke on the condition of anonymity, recalled commotion on the scene and a man making about seven to 10 stabbing motions in the direction of the author, who was in a semi-erect position. She said she ran from the outdoor amphitheater “shaking like a leaf” with fear.
“His fundamental voice cannot and will not be silenced”
On its website, the Chautauqua Institution described Friday’s event as “a discussion about the United States as a haven for writers and other creatives in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression.”
In a statement, the nonprofit education center and summer resort said it was “coordinating with law enforcement officials and emergency services on a public response following today’s attack on Salman Rushdie on the stage of the Chautauqua Amphitheater.”
On Twitter on Friday, the institution asked for “prayers for Salman Rushdie and Henry Reese.” He describes Reese on his website as the co-founder and president of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, which provides “sanctuary … to writers exiled under threat of persecution.” He should have been on stage with Rushdie.
Writers such as Stephen King and JK Rowling expressed well-wishes for Rushdie via Twitter.
Rushdie is the former president of PEN America, a prominent US free speech group for authors, which said it was “stunned with shock and horror at the word of a brutal, premeditated attack”.
“We cannot think of a similar incident of a publicly violent attack on a literary writer on American soil,” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement.
“We hope and fervently believe that his essential voice cannot and will not be silenced.”
Penguin Random House, Rushdie’s publisher, tweeted a statement from CEO Marcus Dole: “We are deeply shocked and appalled to hear of the attack on Salman Rushdie while he was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. We condemn this violent public attack and our thoughts are with Salman and his family at this difficult time.”
The furor over The Satanic Verses haunted Rushdie
The 75-year-old writer – the son of a successful Muslim businessman in India – was educated in England, first at Rugby School and later at Cambridge University, where he received an MA in history.
After college, he began working as an advertising copywriter in London before publishing his first novel, Grimus, in 1975.
Rushdie’s handling of sensitive political and religious subjects makes him a controversial figure. But the publication of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988 haunted him for more than three decades.
Some Muslims found the book blasphemous and sparked public demonstrations. In 1989, the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called Rushdie a blasphemer and said The Satanic Verses were an insult to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, and issued a religious edict, or fatwa, calling for his death.
As a result, the Mumbai-born writer spent a decade under British protection.
In 1999, Rushdie told CNN that the experience taught him “to value even more … intensely the things I used to value, like the art of literature and freedom of expression and the right to say things that other people don’t like .
“It may have been an unpleasant decade, but it was the right fight, you know. The fight was about the things I most believe in versus the things I most dislike, which are bigotry, bigotry and censorship.”
The award against Rushdie was never overturned, although in 1998 the Iranian government tried to distance itself from the fatwa by promising not to seek to enforce it.
But despite what appeared to be a softening of the fatwa, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently reaffirmed the religious edict.
In February 2017, on Khamenei’s official website, the Supreme Leader was asked if “the fatwa against Rushdie is still in effect”, to which Khamenei confirmed that it was, saying: “The decree is as issued by Imam Khomeini.”
CNN’s Liam Reilly, Samantha Beach, Jonny Hallam, Paul P. Murphy, Artemis Moshtaghian and Mark Morales contributed to this report.
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