Rowling Calls for Twitter's Support After Threat Following Rushdie Attack

J.K. Rowling called on Twitter for support after she was threatened on the platform in response to her message of support for Salman Rushdie.

The Harry Potter creator posted a message of support after Rushdie was attacked and stabbed on stage in New York state on Friday.

"Feeling very sick right now. Let him be ok," Rowling wrote on Friday, concerned about the condition of the Booker Prize-winning author.

But Rowling later tweeted a screenshot of a response her tweet which said "don't worry, you are next."

"@TwitterSupport any chance of some support?" wrote Rowling next to the screenshot by user Meer Asif Aziz, whose profile said they were a student and social activist from Pakistan.

The screengrab also showed how Aziz had described Rushdie's alleged attacker Hadi Matar, 24, from Fairview, New Jersey, as a "revolutionary Shia fighter.'"

The alleged threat appears to have now been taken down. Newsweek has contacted Twitter for comment.

Rowling said that the message was being investigated and wrote in a follow up tweet: "To all sending supportive messages: thank you. Police are involved (were already involved on other threats)."

Rowling was among the prominent figures who have expressed their shock at Rushdie's attack.

The Indian-born British author, 75, was set to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution before the incident.

Rushdie was stabbed at least once in the neck and in the abdomen and was taken to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, by helicopter.

The interviewer who was with Rushdie, Henry Reese, suffered a minor head injury.

Rushdie's agent, Andrew Wylie said that the author will "likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged," the BBC reported.

In 1989, Rushdie went into hiding and had police protection in the U.K. after Iran's former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, calling for his killing over his novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims deemed blasphemous.

While the motive for Friday's attack is not yet known, the identification of the suspect spurred social media speculation over whether it was in relation to the fatwa.

In a statement to Newsweek, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) which opposes the Tehran regime, said it "strongly condemns the attack on Salman Rushdie in New York, which took place at the instigation of Khomeini's fatwa in 1988."