DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An Iranian authorities official denied on Monday that Tehran was concerned within the assault on writer Salman Rushdie, although he justified the stabbing in remarks that represented the Islamic Republic’s first public feedback on the assault.
The feedback by Nasser Kanaani, the spokesman of Iran’s Overseas Ministry, got here greater than two days after the assault on Rushdie in New York. The author has now been taken off a ventilator and is “on the highway to restoration,” in response to his agent.
Nevertheless, Iran has denied finishing up different operations overseas focusing on dissidents within the years because the nation’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, regardless of prosecutors and Western governments attributing such assaults again to Tehran. And whereas Iran hasn’t centered on the author in recent times, a decades-old fatwa demanding his killing nonetheless stands.
“Concerning the assault towards Salman Rushdie in America, we don’t contemplate anybody deserving reproach, blame and even condemnation, apart from (Rushdie) himself and his supporters,” Kanaani mentioned.
“On this regard, nobody can blame the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he added. “We imagine that the insults made and the assist he acquired was an insult towards followers of all religions.”
Rushdie, 75, was stabbed Friday whereas attending an occasion in western New York. He suffered a broken liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye fixed, his agent Andrew Wylie mentioned. Rushdie was more likely to lose the injured eye.
His assailant, 24-year-old Hadi Matar, has pleaded not responsible to costs stemming from the assault via his lawyer.
Rushdie has for greater than 30 years confronted loss of life threats for “The Satanic Verses.” Iran’s late Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa, or Islamic edict, demanding his loss of life. A semiofficial Iranian basis had put up a bounty of over $3 million for the writer, although it has but to supply any touch upon the assault.
Police in New York have supplied no motive but for the assault, although District Lawyer Jason Schmidt alluded to the bounty on Rushdie in arguing towards bail throughout a listening to Saturday.
“Even when this courtroom have been to set one million dollars bail, we stand a threat that bail might be met,” Schmidt mentioned.
Matar was born in the US to oldsters who emigrated from Yaroun in southern Lebanon close to the Israeli border, in response to the village’s mayor. Flags of the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah, together with portraits of Hezbollah and Iranian leaders, dangle throughout the village. Israel additionally has bombarded Hezbollah positions close to there up to now.
In Yaroun, village data present Matar holds Lebanese citizenship and is recognized as a Shiite, an official there mentioned. The official, who spoke on situation of anonymity out of safety considerations, mentioned Matar’s father nonetheless lives there however has been in seclusion because the assault.
In his remarks Monday, Kanaani added that Iran didn't “have some other data greater than what the American media has reported.” He additionally implied that Rushdie introduced the assault on himself.
“Salman Rushdie uncovered himself to well-liked anger and fury via insulting the sacredness of Islam and crossing the crimson traces of over 1.5 billion Muslims and likewise crimson traces of followers of all divine religions,” Kanaani mentioned.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whereas indirectly blaming Tehran for the assault on Rushdie, made a degree to say Iran in an announcement early Monday praising the author’s efforts in supporting freedom of expression and faith.
“Iranian state establishments have incited violence towards Rushdie for generations, and state-affiliated media just lately gloated concerning the try on his life,” Blinken mentioned. “That is despicable.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul condemned the assault on Rushdie at a lecture Sunday, saying that “a person with a knife can not silence a person with a pen.”
Khomeini, ill within the final 12 months of his life after the grinding, stalemated Eighties Iran-Iraq warfare had decimated the nation’s economic system, issued the fatwa on Rushdie in 1989. The Islamic edict got here amid a violent uproar within the Muslim world over the novel, which some considered as blasphemously making solutions concerning the Prophet Muhammad’s life.
Whereas fatwas will be revised or revoked, Iran’s present Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who took over after Khomeini — has by no means carried out so. As just lately as February 2017, Khamenei mentioned: “The decree is as Imam Khomeini issued.”
Since 1979, Iran has focused dissidents overseas in assaults. Tensions with the West — significantly the US — have spiked since then-President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled America out of Iran’s nuclear cope with world powers in 2018.
A Trump-ordered drone strike killed a high Iranian Revolutionary Guard basic in 2020, additional fueling these tensions.
Final week, the U.S. charged a Guard member in absentia for allegedly plotting to kill one-time Trump adviser and Iran hawk John Bolton. Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and an aide are beneath 24-hour safety over alleged threats from Iran.
In the meantime, U.S. prosecutors say Iran tried to kidnap in 2021 an Iranian opposition activist and author residing in New York. In current days, a person with an assault rifle was arrested close to her house.
Different denials from the Overseas Ministry have included Tehran’s switch of weapons to Yemen’s Houthi rebels amid that nation’s lengthy civil warfare. Impartial consultants, Western nations and U.N. consultants have traced weapon parts again to Iran.
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Related Press author Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.
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Observe Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP.
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