MANSOURA, Egypt — A trial began Sunday for an
Egyptian man accused of stabbing a woman to
death in a public street after she rejected his advances — a case that has
sparked widespread outrage.
اضافة اعلان
A video went viral
last week appearing to show the victim, identified as student Nayera Ashraf,
being stabbed by a young man outside her university.
The crime has triggered
widespread anger both in Egypt and beyond, having been followed a few days
later by a similar incident in which Jordanian student Iman Irshaid was shot
dead on a university campus.
Social media users
immediately drew comparisons between the two murders, decrying cases of
femicide in the Arab world.
At the Mansoura
Criminal Court, 130km north of Cairo, Mohamed Adel was accused of “premeditated
murder”, after confessing to intentionally killing the victim, an AFP
correspondent said.
Ashraf had
previously reported the alleged perpetrator to the authorities, fearing that he
would attack her, according to her father and witnesses.
The maximum penalty
for murder is death in Egypt, which carried out the third highest number of
executions in the world in 2021, according to
Amnesty International.
“He stabbed her
several times,” said the prosecution, which found “messages threatening to cut
her throat” on the victim’s phone.
The next hearing is
set for Tuesday, the defendant’s lawyer, Ahmed Hamad, told AFP.
In a rare
occurrence among cases involving violence against women, authorities allowed
television cameras to film the hearing on Sunday.
On social media,
many Jordanian and Egyptian users called for the perpetrator to be sentenced to
death, while others said men must “learn to take no for an answer”.
Egyptian preacher
Mabrouk Attia sparked outrage last week after suggesting that the victim would
not have met the same fate had she been veiled.
Nearly 8 million
Egyptian women were victims of violence committed by their partners or
relatives, or by strangers in public spaces, according to a UN survey conducted
in 2015.
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