While he wouldn’t want to go back to that kind of existence, the attack on him last week will likely lead to a drastic review of his security. In the years after the fatwa was issued in February 1989, Rushdie moved from rented house to rented house and rarely appeared in public. An appearance on Have I Got News for You caused a sensation in June 1994, five years after she disappeared from the limelight. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The Sun newspaper commented: “Have I Got News For You is a funny programme, but taxpayers wouldn’t have the last laugh. We pay a fortune to protect Salman Rushdie, who is supposed to be in hiding.” Rushdie described what life was like in hiding in a third-person autobiography, published in September 2012, under the name Joseph Anton – the pseudonym Rushdie adopted as a tribute to Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. In it, Rushdie explained that he had been told he was in the second tier – which meant he was considered more at risk than anyone else in the UK, except perhaps the Queen – and as he was being threatened by a foreign power, he was entitled to his protection British state”. He was assigned two plainclothes police armed with revolvers, two drivers and two armored cars – a Jaguar and a Range Rover – the latter in case the former broke down. The Special Branch operation was codenamed Malachite and the officers, who were with it around the clock, worked two-week shifts and had to volunteer for the job. Scotland Yard declined to reveal how much the security operation cost, but it is rumored to be in the multi-million pounds. In May 1995 Lady Blatch, a government minister, told parliament: “It is standard practice not to disclose the cost of protecting an individual in order to avoid the risk of inferring the extent of that protection.” On Monday, the Met police reiterated the line, stating simply: “The Met does not discuss safeguarding matters.” Rushdie began living, first in Los Angeles and then in New York, where he felt he could enjoy a greater degree of freedom, often mixing in celebrity circles. In April 2000, 17 months before 9/11, the New York Observer quoted a colleague as saying, “We can’t enjoy our meal. We don’t want to die because of his fatwa. It’s so passive-aggressive towards people in Manhattan. We have enough problems here.” The article added: “Now that Mr. Rushdie is in town, it is unclear what kind of protection, if any, New York will offer.” Detective Joseph Pentangelo of the New York Police Department’s press office told the newspaper: “Usually an assessment is made and the wishes of the subject are taken into account. “The intelligence department does not want to talk about any kind of strategy. They feel that discussing strategies would jeopardize the strategies themselves.” Rushdie preferred not to have insurance. “The police have always had enormous respect for my privacy,” he once explained. “They understood that it was very difficult for me to live in a house with four strangers.” The threats, however, were real: on July 2, 1993, Islamist militants set fire to a hotel in eastern Turkey in an attempt to kill the writer Aziz Nesin, who translated the Satanic Verses into Turkish. On July 3, Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of the book, was attacked with a knife in his apartment in Milan, but survived. Nine days later, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the Satanic Verses was stabbed multiple times and his body left in a hallway outside his office at the University of Tsukuba. William Nygaard, the Norwegian editor of The Satanic Verses, was shot three times on October 11, 1993 but survived. The threat of death never went away. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, threatened to retaliate against Britain for knighting Rushdie in July 2007. He issued a 20-minute audio tape titled in which he said: “If you have not learned the lesson, then we are ready to repeat it, God willing, until we are sure that you have fully understood it.”
