Rushdie talks to investigators while hospitalized in New York

Aug. 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The British of Indian origin Salman Rushdie spoke with investigators on Tuesday while he remains hospitalized in New York after receiving several stab wounds last Friday at an event at the Chautauqua Institution.

The writer, who has been awake and without a respirator since Sunday, has been able to have an “articulated” conversation to reconstruct the steps of his attacker, an agent with direct knowledge of the investigation told .

The man accused of stabbing him, a 24-year-old Lebanese man, Hadi Matar, pleaded not guilty earlier in the day on Saturday to charges of attempted murder and assault. Rushdie received at least twelve confirmed stab wounds to the face, neck, liver, chest and abdomen.

The Government of Iran rejected on Monday any relationship with the attack on Rushdie, whom it has nevertheless accused of crossing “red lines” with his texts and of “insulting” Islam. Specifically, the spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Naser Kanani, assured in a public appearance that Tehran has no relationship with the assailant.

The suspicion falls on Matar that he sympathized on social networks with the Revolutionary Guard of Iran, a country that declared in 1989 a ‘fatwa’ to kill the writer for his book ‘The Satanic Verses’, published a year earlier and considered in the Islamic republic an act of heresy.