After three days of silence, Iran on Monday denied any involvement in the attack perpetrated in the United States once morest Salman Rushdie, blaming the author of the “Satanic Verses”, 33 years following the fatwa of the Ayatollah Khomeini sentencing him to death.
“We categorically deny” any link between the aggressor and Iran, and “no one has the right to accuse the Islamic Republic”, affirmed Nasser Kanani, spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in his conference of weekly press.
This is Tehran’s first official reaction to Friday’s attack on the 75-year-old British and American writer on the dais of an amphitheater at a cultural center in Chautauqua, in the northwest. of New York State.
“In this attack, only Salman Rushdie and his supporters deserve to be blamed and even condemned,” said the Iranian spokesman.
“By insulting the sacred principles of Islam and crossing the red lines of more than a billion and a half Muslims and all followers of divine religions, Salman Rushdie has exposed himself to the anger and rage of the people “, he added.
Hospitalized for serious injuries following the attack, Salman Rushdie is doing a little better according to his relatives. He is no longer on life support and “the road to recovery has begun”, welcomed his agent Andrew Wylie in a press release sent to the Washington Post.
– “Anger” –
Salman Rushdie, born in 1947 in India into a family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals, provoked anger in part of the Muslim world with the publication in 1988 of “Satanic Verses”, a novel judged by the most rigorous as blasphemous to the regard to the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad.
The founder of the Islamic Republic issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, who lived for years under police protection.
Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa once morest the writer was never lifted and many of his translators came under attack.
“The anger shown at the time (…) was not limited to Iran and the Islamic Republic. Millions of people in Arab, Muslim and non-Muslim countries reacted angrily” to the work by Salman Rushdie, the spokesman for Iranian Foreign Affairs said on Monday.
He considered it “completely contradictory” to “condemn on the one hand the action of the aggressor and absolve the action of the one who insults sacred and Islamic things”.
The alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old American of Lebanese descent, was charged with “attempted murder and assault”. He pleaded “not guilty” by the voice of his lawyer.
His mother told the Daily Mail website that he returned “changed” and more religious from a 2018 trip to Lebanon.
Saying to herself “sorry for Mr. Rushdie”, of whom she knew nothing before this attack, Silvana Fardos, who has lived in the United States for 26 years, assured not to deal with politics and judged that her son was “responsible for his deeds”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday judged “despicable” the way Iranian state media had reacted following the attack on the intellectual.
The ultra-conservative daily Kayhan praised the alleged assailant as a “brave and duty-conscious man who attacked the apostate and vicious Salman Rushdie”.
Javan, another ultra-conservative newspaper, wrote that it was a plot by the United States which “probably wanted to spread Islamophobia in the world”.
A sensitive subject in Iran, several people interviewed by AFP in recent days in Tehran refused to comment on the attack on Salman Rushdie in front of a camera.
