Nourhane. We only know her first name, but the Cairo University employee is far from being the first woman killed by a man in Egypt this year. “An employee of one of the faculties of Cairo University” “fired shots” at one of his colleagues, “causing her death,” details the press release from the Egyptian police. 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, Nourhane, identified by her first name only, 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.
The failure of deterrence by the death penalty
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. 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 in particular.
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 feminicides 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.