200 Flee After Bomb Threat at Publisher of ‘Satanic’ in U.S.

An anonymous caller threatened Wednesday afternoon to blow up the headquarters of author Salman Rushdie’s U.S. publisher, sending the firm’s employees and tenants of neighboring offices scurrying to safety on a Manhattan sidewalk.

About 200 people waited outside in a damp chill for about an hour as police searched the ornate building where Viking Penguin has its offices. Authorities said they found no evidence of a bomb.

Such threats have become almost commonplace at Viking Penguin as furor surrounding Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” has escalated. The offices have been evacuated at least six times since the threats began, shortly before Christmas.

Viking Penguin has taken “appropriate security measures,” a spokesman said. However, it was clear that Viking Penguin employees and those who work nearby were taking scant reassurance in light of the call by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s leader, for the execution of the author and his publishers.

“We’d like them to move out,” grumbled an employee of an advertising agency in the building. The tension was such that none of the employees evacuated from the building agreed to be interviewed without assurances of anonymity.

Shortly after the employees re-entered the headquarters, Viking Penguin spokesman Paul Slovak read a statement from the company and Rushdie announcing that the author’s three-week, 11-city publicity tour of the United States will be canceled.

In New York, PEN America Center, which represents 2,100 writers, editors and translators, issued a statement protesting “all limitations on freedom of expression, be it the banning of books, the burning of books and particularly the issuing of death threats against writers.”

Digby Diehl, vice president of PEN U.S.A. Center West in Los Angeles, said the Rushdie tour would have been possible only under conditions of “unreasonable” security. “The book has received an amount of publicity it could never have purchased,” he said. “In the interests of his life, you’ve got to be sensible.”

Times staff writer Terry Pristin in Los Angeles contributed to this story.