Egyptian prosecutors announced on Tuesday that they had arrested a young man accused of killing a student outside his university because she turned down his advances.
The suspected killer from Mansoura, 130 km north of Cairo, “was held in preventive detention for four days in front of her faculty as part of an investigation into the premeditated murder of student Nira,” prosecutors said in a statement.
A video released Monday was widely shared on social media, with netizens claiming it showed the young man stabbing Nira before he was arrested by bystanders.
The defendant “admitted to killing the victim because she refused to have a relationship with him,” prosecutors add.
Several witnesses, including the victim’s father, reported that the young girl had already put down a handrail and said she feared an attack by the defendant, according to prosecutors.
On social media, some called for “society as a whole to take better care of their children”, others claimed “this will never happen again”. “Everyone needs to take care of others to avoid horror movies like this,” wrote one user.
In Egypt, women feel regularly exposed to violence and especially harmed by the law, in a country where the spread of a harsh view of Islam since the 1970s and conservative traditions have shaped the development of women’s rights.
In early 2021, the government even proposed – unsuccessfully – a bill aimed at restricting the rights of nearly 50 million Egyptian women, for example by allowing their father or brothers to annul their marriages.