Rushdie, 75, is now on the road to recovery, his agent said Sunday. He was taken into custody on a ventilator a day earlier in the day after being hospitalized with injuries to his neck, eye, liver, and chest. The author was stabbed about a dozen times during a speaking event in a resort in western New York on Friday.
Rushdie is best known for his sharianism, which has been banned in Iran and is considered by some Muslims to be blasphemous. A decades-old fatwa demanding his killing still stands, even though attention on the issue had dwindled in recent years.
Tehran said it had no knowledge of or relation to the attacker.
Kanaani continued, saying that we have not seen anything other than what we heard from the American media. We deny any connection between the assailant and Iran. The suspect, identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar from New Jersey, pleaded not guilty Saturday to charges of second-degree attempted murder. Prior to the attack, Matar expressed views sympathetic to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on social media.
The incident was met by global shock and outrage and left the Western world reeling.
Iranian media celebrated Rushdie's attack.
The front pages of state-owned newspapers were splashed with caricatures of Rushdie under headlines gloating about the stabbing.
The Iranian daily newspaper Jam e Jam's front page reads the devil as a devil without an eye. The attack was a divine revenge on its front page, according to the hard-line Kayhan paper.
State-affiliated media recently gloated about the attempt on his life, as Iranian state institutions have incited violence against Rushdie for generations, and state-affiliated media has gloated about the attempt on his life, he said in a statement late Sunday. This is deplorable. The author has lived with death threats for three decades.
The Satanic Verses, featuring a character based on Prophet Muhammad, outraged much of the Muslim world when it was published in the late 1980s, sparking protests and a firestorm that forced Rushdie into hiding for many years.
The novel drew the wrath of the Iranian government, leading Iran s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa, or edict, calling for his death. A semiofficial Iranian foundation put up a bounty of $3 million for the author.
Amin Hossein Khodadadi reported from Tehran, and Rhoda Kwan reported from Taipei, Taiwan.