Another young woman murdered after rejecting perpetrator’s romantic advances

Another young woman was killed on Saturday by a man whose marriage proposal was rejected, the third case of its kind to grab the public's attention over a period of just four months. 

Amany Abdel Karim, a 19-year-old student at Monufiya University, was shot dead outside her house in a Monufiya village by Ahmed Fathy Omaira, 29, a fellow resident of the village who was rejected by her family after asking for her hand in marriage.

Fathy Omaira later shot himself, said the Interior Ministry on Sunday evening, after security services found his body by a roadside. 

According to witnesses quoted by local media, the perpetrator followed Abdel Karim and shot her in the back with a birdshot rifle outside her house, before fleeing the scene. The university student was transferred to a hospital, where she died due to her wounds.

The horrific incident echoes the recent June and August murders of university students Nayera Ashraf, 21, and Salma Bahgat, 20, both of whom were stabbed to death in broad daylight by men whose proposals they had declined.

The sudden frequency of such incidents, said Shaimaa Tantawi, director of Barah Aamen, a feminist NGO conducting research and advocating against gender-based violence, should not be dismissed as though these are regular murders, nor assumed to be a common form of gendered violence rendered publicly visible by the social media storms that have accompanied the three womens’ deaths this summer.

They require a closer examination of the contexts of gender, class and culture in question, and steps toward wider social change regarding gender equality are needed, she said, noting that legal punishment of the incidents by the state has proved clearly insufficient to deter their recurrence.

The accused of murdering Ashraf at the Mansoura University campus, Mohamed Adel, is in the process of appealing a death sentence, with high profile lawyer Farid al-Deeb presenting his defense pro bono, while a session in the trial of the accused of Bahgat’s murder was held on Sunday at the Zagazig Criminal Court, close to where she was killed. The defense requested medical reports and pleadings be included as evidence, which was adjourned for the additional information to be prepared.

Tantawi noted that, while social media cannot be assumed to represent society, commentators online in the wake of Ashraf’s murder showed notable sympathy toward the perpetrator, Adel, as “an average guy who could be any of them,” while probing into Ashraf’s private life to frame her as a less relatable character, “living outside the norms.” Such discourse, Tantawi continued, inspired a wave of murder threats directed at women on social media in the weeks after Ashraf’s murder, and could have played a role in inspiring the two murders that followed.