O Writer Salman Rushdie gave his first television interview after the attack that left him blind in one eye, in August 2022, and confessed what he thought at the time.
In an interview given to the program ’60 Minutes’, which will be broadcast in full on CBS on Sunday, the 76-year-old writer told not only what the doctor told him, but how, in a way, he was already ‘waiting’ of the attack, which took place on the outskirts of New York, in the United States, during an event he was presenting.
“I confess that I had already imagined my murder happening at a public event or happening in this way. So, my first thought when I saw this murderous shape running towards me, I thought: ‘So it’s you. Here you are'”he explained to CBS, in an interview conducted by Anderson Cooper.
Rushdie will release a new book next week about what happened that day, August 12th. ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ [‘Faca: Meditações após uma tentativa de assassinato’, na tradução livre]. It will be published on April 16.
“I was sitting on the right”, Rushdie said about that day, which left him blind in his right eye and also without mobility in one of his hands. “Then, out of the corner of my right eye – the last thing he would see – I saw the man in black running towards me. Black clothes and mask. He was approaching with force and low. Like a crouching missile”, he described .
Rushdie further described the situation as if it were “something that came from the distant past and was trying to drag it back in time”. “To the distant past, to kill me,” he pointed.
The writer spent six weeks in the hospital, where he had a conversation with a surgeon. “One of the doctors said to me, ‘First, you were very unlucky, and then you were very lucky. The lucky part is that the man who attacked you I had no idea how to kill someone like a knife'”, he remembered
The attack was caught in the act, and he was found innocent when charged with attempted murder, as well as second-degree assault. He is still detained.
Salman Rushdie is the author of ‘The Satanic Verses’, a work for which he was sentenced to death by religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, who issued a ‘fatwa’ (decree of Islamic law) against the writer. The attack happened 33 years after this ‘fatwa’ was issued. The writer ended up living in an unknown location, under security.
Iran then offered a reward of three million dollars to anyone who assassinated Rushdie. The Iranian government has long distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment remains.
In 2012, an Iranian religious foundation increased the reward for Rushdie’s murder to $3.3 million. Rushdie downplayed the threat at the time, saying there was “no evidence” that anyone was interested in the reward.
That year, the writer published the memoir ‘Joseph Anton – A Memoir’, about the ‘fatwa’.
Read Also: Writer Salman Rushdie warns that freedom of expression is at risk
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Source: https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/mundo/2539731/entao-es-tu-o-que-pensou-salman-rushdie-durante-ataque-que-o-cegou
