Police have identified the suspect in the stabbing of novelist Sir Salman Rushdie.
Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was taken into custody by the New York State Patrol immediately after the Friday morning stabbing.
Law enforcement officials speaking in Jamestown, New York, alleged that the suspect jumped on stage and stabbed the writer at least once in the neck and once in the abdomen.
Authorities believe he was acting alone.
Rushdie was transported to the hospital by helicopter.
Rushdie was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in rural New York, about 70 miles southwest of Buffalo.
The Institution holds a summer lecture series that invited the author for a discussion on ‘the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression.’
Chautauqua Institution cancelled the remaining programs after the incident. They asked for prayers for Rushdie and interviewer Henry Reese, who police say suffered a minor head injury during the attack.
The attacker’s motive is unknown, but the Booker Prize winning novelist has been targeted by Islamist extremist for decades since Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him.
The fatwa, issued in 1989, was later accompanied by a $3million bounty for anyone who killed Rushdie.
Due to ongoing threats against his life, Rushdie spent decades with a 24/7 police security detail.
The Iranian government has since stopped supporting the fatwa, but they have never officially retracted it.
The 75-year-old Indian-born British author is still currently undergoing surgery, police confirmed.
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