The World - News from April 21, 1989

Supporters of Salman Rushdie, the novelist under an Iranian death threat, voiced dismay at plans by British and other Western publishers to participate in next month’s Tehran Book Fair. “We are concerned that participation . . . will be interpreted by the Iranian government and others as an acceptance of the death threat,” said a statement by the International Committee for the Defense of Salman Rushdie and His Publishers. Rushdie has been in hiding for two months since Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, said the Bombay-born British writer’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” blasphemed Islam and ordered his death.