The Scotland Police said on Sunday that they were investigating an online threat made to author JK Rowling on a Twitter post she wrote in reaction to the stabbing of writer Salman Rushdie, Reuters reported.
Hours after Rushdie was attacked at an event in New York on Friday, Rowling had tweeted saying she was “feeling very sick”. In response, a Twitter user by the name Meer Asif Aziz wrote: “Don’t worry you are next”.
Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, then sought help from the user support team of Twitter, pointing out that the threat message violated the community guidelines of the social media platform.
The tweet to Rowling was later deleted and the account of Aziz was suspended by Sunday evening.
A spokesperson for Scotland Police said on Sunday: “We have received a report of an online threat being made and officers are carrying out enquiries.”
Rushdie was stabbed in the neck and abdomen at an event in New York’s Chautauqua Institution on Friday. The writer’s liver and nerves in an arm were damaged and he is likely to lose an eye, his agent Andrew Wylie has said.
However, on Sunday, he was taken off ventilator support and was able to talk.
Rushdie’s attacker was identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar of New Jersey. He has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder in the second degree and other charges. Officials have not yet been able to determine a motive for the attack.
The author has faced several death threats since his novel The Satanic Verses was published in 1988, as many Muslims consider it to be blasphemous. In 1989, Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a religious edict known as a fatwa, asking Muslims to kill Rushdie.
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