Egypt marked by a new case of feminicide. The Egyptian prosecutor’s office announced early Wednesday that it had detained a student for the murder of a classmate who refused his advances. The case comes two months after a similar killing sparked outrage in the country. Two weeks ago, a court asked to broadcast live the execution of the murderer of Nayera Achraf, a student stabbed to death outside her university in June to “deter as many people as possible”.
This Tuesday, a 22-year-old Egyptian “stabbed the victim, Salma, several times with a knife”, a few steps from the Zagazig courthouse, the prosecution reports. Also 22 years old according to the local press, the victim was studying journalism in this city 60 km north of Cairo.
“Being born a woman in a misogynistic society”
The alleged murderer now faces the death penalty in the country that hands out the most capital punishments in the world for killing the woman many Egyptians are now calling “the new Nayera Ashraf” on social media.
For many Internet users, “Salma was murdered simply because she was born a woman in a misogynistic society”. But in the conservative country, many others blame the girl who “shouldn’t have been friends with a man”. “As long as there are supporters who apologize to the perpetrators of these crimes, they will continue,” concludes another Internet user.
Feminicides on the rise
Egyptian women say they are regularly exposed to violence and wronged by the law, in a country where strict Islam has steadily gained ground since the 1970s. According to the authorities, nearly eight million women had suffered violence. in 2015 by a spouse, relative or stranger in the public space.
If a quarter of the government and a third of Parliament are women, for feminists, this is only a facade because this did not prevent the government from proposing (unsuccessfully) in early 2021 a bill aimed at restricting the rights of nearly 50 million Egyptian women, for example by allowing their father or their brothers to annul their marriage.
Several feminicides have also made headlines in Egypt in recent months, including that of a television presenter, Chaïma Gamal. In March, a teenager was given a five-year suspended prison sentence for the suicide of a high school student whom he blackmailed by publishing naked photomontages of her on the Internet.