Iran says it did not attack Rushdie, but he deserved it | Tehran’s first official reaction to the attack on the 75-year-old author

Government of Iran denied any links to the aggressor Friday’s stabbing in America For a British writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie, 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa sentenced him to death. This was the first official reaction from Tehran to the attack against the 75-year-old author, which took place in the amphitheater of a cultural center in Chautauqua, New York state.

“We categorically deny any relationship between the aggressors and Iran. “No one has the right to blame the Islamic Republic,” he said. Nasser Kanani, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman. “In this attack, Only Rushdie and his supporters deserve to be blamed and condemned“, Kanani asserted during his weekly press conference in Tehran.

The officer complied Rushdie “exposed himself to the wrath and fury of the people by insulting the sacred things of Islam. And crossing the red lines of more than 1,500 million Muslims and followers of all divine religions” In his novel Satanic VersesPublished in 1988. Kanani does not mention that Khomeini’s fatwa called for Rushdie’s assassination in 1989 and anyone involved in the book’s publication forced the author to spend years in hiding.

Instead, he denied the alleged assault. Hadi Matar, identified by experts in Islamic extremism as sympathetic to Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, considered a hardline faction of the Iranian regime. Kanani opined that it is completely contradictory to simultaneously “condemn the action of the aggressor and remove the action of the desecrator of sacred and Islamic things”.

Rushdie was about to speak at a literary event in New York on Friday when someone from the audience climbed onto the stage and stabbed him repeatedly in the neck and stomach. The alleged victim of attempted murder and assault is a 24-year-old Lebanese American. Mather has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Sunday that Iranian state media were “delighted” by the attack on the writer. “This is despicable,” Blinken said in a statement.

In Iran, Ultraconservative newspaper Kaihan Mather referred to him as a “brave and dutiful man who attacked the traitor and cruel Salman Rushdie”.. The JavaneseAnother ultra-conservative morning paper wrote on Sunday that it was a US conspiracy with the “possible” aim of “spreading Islamophobia in the world”.

75-year-old Rushdie has been hospitalized in a critical conditionWith liver, kidney and eye damage, he may pass out, but he is making positive progress and no longer needs assisted breathing.