New York: Controversial writer Salman Rushdie who was stabbed onstage at a New York event Friday is alive but could lose one eye, his agent said.
In a statement late Friday night, Rushdie's agent Andrew Wylie said: "The news is not good... Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged," dpa news agency reported.
Meanwhile, police identified the man who attacked Salman Rushdie as Hadi Matar. He was arrested at the scene and was awaiting arraignment.
“The motive for the stabbing was unclear”, State police Major Eugene J. Staniszewski said.
Rushdie, who has a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head, was stabbed on Friday while he was on stage readying to speak at an event in New York State on the US as the home of creative expression.
State Police said Rushdie, who appeared to have been stabbed in his neck, was flown by helicopter to a hospital from the remote education and spiritual centre in Chautauqua about 550 km from New York City.
Rushdie was participating at the Chautauqua Institution in a "discussion of the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression", according to the organisation's website.
Following the publication in 1989 of his novel, "Satanic Verses", which some Muslims considered blasphemous, the then Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death.
Various Iranian organisations put rewards of more than $3 million for killing the 75-year-old India-born writer.
Rushdie went underground with British government protection for several years and moved to the US in 2000 and has since been in public.
He escaped an assassination attempt in 1989 when a bomb went off at a London hotel where he was thought to be staying and demolished two floors of the building.
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