Salman Rushdie has been taken off his ventilator and is talking as he recovers from wounds inflicted by a knife-wielding attacker who stormed the stage at a lecture in upstate New York.

British-American writer Aatish Taseer said, in a since-deleted tweet, that the 75-year-old was “off the ventilator and talking (and joking)”, which was then confirmed by the author’s literary agent Andrew Wylie.

Mr Wylie had earlier said Rushdie was using the ventilator and could lose an eye after he sustained injuries to his arm and liver in the attack.

The Indian-born Briton, whose novel The Satanic Verses led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was about to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York when he was attacked.

‘Not guilty’ plea

The man accused of stabbing him pleaded not guilty on Saturday to charges of attempted murder and assault in what a prosecutor called a “pre-planned” crime.

A lawyer for the accused, Hadi Matar, 24, entered the plea on his behalf during a formal hearing at a court in western New York.

Indian-born author Rushdie, 75, who spent years in hiding after Iran urged Muslims to kill him over his novel The Satanic Verses, was stabbed in the neck and torso on stage at a lecture on Friday.

Schmidt said state and federal law enforcement agencies, including in New Jersey, were working to understand the planning and preparation which preceded the attack and determine whether additional charges should be filed.

Police are looking into the motive. Photo: Getty

Reuters could not immediately establish whether Matar, who bought a pass to the event at the Chautauqua Institution, had legal representation.

A preliminary law enforcement review of Matar’s social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shi’ite extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), although no definitive links had been found, according to NBC New York.

The IRGC is a powerful faction that controls a business empire as well as elite armed and intelligence forces that Washington accuses of carrying out a global extremist campaign.

Matar was born in California and recently moved to New Jersey, the NBC New York report said, adding that he had a fake driver’s license on him. He was arrested at the scene by a state trooper after audience members wrestled him to the ground.

FBI officials went to Matar’s last listed address, in Fairview, a Bergen County borough just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, on Friday evening, NBC New York reported.

Rushdie has long faced death threats for Satanic Verses. The 1988 novel, viewed by some Muslims as containing blasphemous passages, was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations.

In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to kill the author and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was stabbed to death in 1991.

‘Irrevocable fatwa’

There has been no official government reaction in Iran to the attack on Rushdie, but several hardline Iranian newspapers expressed praise for his assailant.

Iranian organisations, some linked to the government, have raised a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s murder. Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as recently as 2019 that the fatwa was “irrevocable.”

Ali Tehfe, mayor of Yaroun in southern Lebanon, said Matar was the son of a man from the town. The suspect’s parents emigrated to the United States and he was born and raised there, the mayor added.

Asked whether Matar or his parents were affiliated with or supported the Iran-backed Hezbollah armed group in Lebanon, Tehfe said he had “no information at all” on their political views.

A Hezbollah official told Reuters on Saturday that the group had no additional information on the attack on Rushdie.

The stabbing was condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on freedom of expression.

-with AAP