From Le Figaro with AFP
Posted 31 minutes ago
Cairo University, August 6, 2019. KHALED DESOUKI / AFP
The man rejected by this Cairo University employee fired several shots. He killed himself with the same weapon as he was about to be arrested by the police.
A Cairo University employee was shot dead by a rejected colleague. Egypt’s Interior Ministry announced late Wednesday, September 27, a new murder case against a woman in the most populous Arab country. “An employee of one of the faculties of Cairo University” “fired shots” at one of his colleagues, “leading to her death,” the police press release said.
And when authorities got their hands on the suspect in Marsa Matrouh, 450 kilometers west of the capital, he “killed himself by shooting himself with the same weapon” used to kill the victim. According to state-run newspaper Al-Ahram, the victim, identified only by her first name, Nourhane, allegedly rejected a marriage proposal from her colleague Ahmed, who harassed her. The suspect had already been arrested because he “set the victim’s car on fire five years ago and threatened her via text message,” according to the daily.
Many women were killed in 2022
Just the day before, the local press reported the murder of a woman by her ex-fiancé as she left her workplace in the fashionable Heliopolis district of eastern Cairo. In 2022, several murders of women in the country caused a stir, with 301 women or young girls killed in the same year, according to the NGO Idrak. At the end of June, the murderer of a student who refused his advance payments was sentenced to death. On the same day, the courts announced the murder of a television presenter by her judge husband.
Two months later, that same judge was also sentenced to death, while a court called for executions of femicide perpetrators to be broadcast live on television to “deter as many people as possible.” Murder is punishable by death in Egypt, which carried out the fourth-highest number of executions in the world in 2022, according to Amnesty International. Although women in Egypt have voted since 1956, they are still subject to centuries-old patriarchal legislation and, feminists say, are the first victims of the spread of rigorous Islam that has accompanied the entrenchment of conservatism.
Egyptians expressed their frustration on social networks: “How long do women have to pay with their lives for saying no?” asked the educational initiative Speak Up.