Egypt: woman killed at Cairo University by rejected colleague

A Cairo University employee was shot and killed by a rejected colleague, the Egyptian Interior Ministry announced late Wednesday, a new case of femicide in the most populous Arab country.

“An employee of one of the faculties of Cairo University” “fired shots” at one of his colleagues, “causing her death,” details the police press release.

And when the 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” as that used to kill the victim.

According to the state newspaper Al-Ahram, the victim, identified only by her first name, Nourhane, allegedly refused a marriage proposal from her colleague, Ahmed, who was harassing her.

The suspect had already been arrested for having “set fire to the victim’s car five years ago and having threatened him by SMS”, according to the daily.

Only the day before, the local press announced the assassination of a woman by her ex-fiancé as she left work in the chic Heliopolis district, in eastern Cairo.

In 2022, several feminicides had been highly publicized in the country where, the same year, according to the NGO Idrak, 301 women or young girls were killed.

At the end of June, the murderer of a student who refused his advances was sentenced to death.

The same day the courts announced the murder of a television presenter by her magistrate husband.

Two months later, this judge was also sentenced to the death penalty, while a court called for the broadcast of the executions of perpetrators of femicide live on television to “dissuade the greatest number”.

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.

In Egypt, although women have been voting since 1956, they remain subject to century-old patriarchal legislation and are the first victims, according to feminists, of the spread of a rigorist Islam associated with the entrenchment of conservatism.

On social networks, Egyptians voiced their frustration: “how long will women have to pay with their lives for saying no?” asked the Speak Up education initiative.