Sir Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator at hospital and could lose an eye after being stabbed at a theatre in upstate New York yesterday, his agent said.
The British author was about to give a talk on the United States being a haven for persecuted writers when an attacker charged on to the stage.
Rushdie, 75, spent nearly a decade in hiding after the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for his death in 1989 in response to his novel The Satanic Verses, which many Muslims held to be blasphemous.
Rushdie had lived a relatively normal life in recent years
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Witnesses in the theatre saw a masked man dressed in black striking Rushdie ten or fifteen times and watched him, bloodied, fall to the floor. A doctor in the
