Iran's suggestion Rushdie to blame for attack 'ludicrous': Britain

LONDON/TEHERAN • The suggestion that novelist Salman Rushdie was responsible for the attack on him is ludicrous, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said yesterday, after Iran's Foreign Ministry suggested the author was to blame.

"Clearly it is ludicrous to suggest that Salman Rushdie was in any way responsible for this abhorrent attack on him," the spokesman told reporters.

"This was not just an attack on him, it was an attack on the right to free speech and expression and the UK government stands both by him and his family, but equally we stand in defence of free speech around the world."

Earlier yesterday, Iran denied any link with the attacker who stabbed Mr Rushdie. Instead, Teheran blamed the writer himself for the incident.

"We categorically deny" any link with the attack and "no one has the right to accuse the Islamic Republic of Iran", said Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani in Teheran's first official reaction to last Friday's stabbing.

"In this attack, we do not consider anyone other than Salman Rushdie and his supporters worthy of blame and even condemnation," he said at his weekly press conference in the Iranian capital.

Mr Rushdie, 75, was put on a ventilator after suffering multiple stab wounds when he was attacked at a literary event in western New York state.

The suspected assailant, 24-year-old Hadi Matar from New Jersey, was wrestled to the ground by staff and other audience members before being taken into police custody. He was later arraigned in court and pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges.

Mr Rushdie has lived under threat for decades since enraging Iranian clerical authorities through his writing. His 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, is viewed by some Muslims as containing blasphemous passages.

Iran's supreme leader at the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989 issued a religious decree, or fatwa, ordering Muslims to kill Mr Rushdie and anyone involved in the book's publication.

Mr Rushdie then spent many years under police protection.

The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa.

But in 2019, Twitter suspended Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's account over a tweet that said the fatwa against Mr Rushdie was "solid and irrevocable".

Mr Rushdie has lived relatively openly in recent years.

He was about to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York on the importance of the US as a haven for targeted artists when the attack happened.

An initial law enforcement review of the suspected attacker's social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shi'a extremism and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), according to NBC New York.

The IRGC is a powerful faction that Washington accuses of carrying out a global extremist campaign.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS