Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah claimed on Saturday, August 13, that it had no information about the brutal attack on author Salman Rushdie. This reaction came almost a day after the writer was stabbed by an Islamist named Hadi Matar aged 24. He attacked Salman Rushdie during a program when he was on the stage ahead of a talk in New York. It is notable that Salman Rushdie has been living under threats for the last 30 years after Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against him for his allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses.
Interestingly, the attacker Hadi Matar had a fake driver’s license bearing the name Hassan Mughniyah. This name is a mix of two senior officials of the terror group Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s current leader is Hassan Nasrallah while Imad Mughniyeh was a senior Hezbollah official close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani. Qassem Soleimani was assassinated by the US in January 2020 in a targeted attack in Iraq.
According to a report by the Times of India, on Saturday, a spokesperson from the Iran-backed Hezbollah stated that the group had no additional information on the stabbing attack on Salman Rushdie. On the condition of anonymity, he said, “We don’t know anything about this subject so we will not comment.”
According to the Chautauqua County District Attorney, Hadi Matar, 24, was accused of attempting to murder in the second degree after stabbing author Salman Rushdie at an event in New York state. A resident of Fairview in New Jersey, Hadi, jumped onto the stage and attacked the novelist with a knife. After living in obscurity for years due to death threats, novelist Salman Rushdie remarked in an interview only weeks before he was hacked and critically injured by the assailant that his life was now relatively normal.
Salman Rushdie was taken to the hospital after the attack and had surgery. He has suffered damage to essential organs and may lose sight in one eye. Rushdie’s agent Andrew Wylie shared that he is still in a critical state. He added that Rushdie was being put on ventilator support and that he could not speak. “The news is not good. Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed, and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” Wylie said.
Salman Rushdie’s book ‘The Satanic Verses,’ released in September 1988, sparked outrage across the world among Muslims. Following the publication of his book, which Muslims deemed to be blasphemous, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa on February 14, 1989, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Since then, not only has Salman Rushdie been living under a perpetual threat but the translators and publishers of his book have also been the targets of Islamists across the world.