A young woman was brutally murdered outside her university in Egypt by another student as she refused to accept his marriage proposal. Naira Ashraf Abdel Qader, 21, was stabbed to death on Monday morning at the entrance of Mansoura University in front of numerous onlookers and CCTV cameras.
As per reports, the suspect identified as Mohamed Adel, was a third-year student of Arts at the same university. He has been referred to the criminal court and is expected to stand trial for first degree murder, with the first hearing on Sunday, Middle East Monitor reported.
The Egyptian Prosecutors state that Adel had been pursuing Ashraf for a year and half. She had blocked even blocked him on social media. After his arrest at the scene he was taken into custody where he revealed that as Ashraf "became famous" on social media and amassed a following he was enraged and thus proceeded to kill her.
According to eye-witnesses, Adel first beat Ashraf until she fell, hitting her head on the pavement then stabbed her repeatedly in her neck and torso. He tried to flee but the people at the scene immediately grabbed him waited for the police to arrive.
An Egyptian news media, Najum Masria, revealed that the young girl's father Ashraf Abdelkader, in a TV interview mentioned that his daughter was being harassed and threatened by the killer. Adel had created numerous fake accounts to stalk her on social media.
The family had even approached the police as the threats became serious but no action was taken. Eventually Abdelkader had to file for a restraining order in April, CNN reported.
"She did not want to get married, she wanted to follow her career ... and wanted to be a flight attendant," the grieving father added.
Human rights groups are enraged by this negligence displayed by the Egyptian authorities towards protecting the women. Taking into consideration the rise in violence against women and girls, Amnesty International heavily criticized the authorities.
The horrifying video of the whole stabbing has also gone viral on social media, with hundreds and thousands of users re-sharing and retweeting the incident with the hashtag #Justice_for_Naira_Ashraf.
Human rights watchers explicitly called out the large-scale campaigns organized by the Egyptian authorities for the protection of the rights to privacy, freedom of expression and non-discrimination of female social media influencers.
Lobna Darwish, gender and human rights officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), stated that Ashraf's murder was "not" an isolated incident, there are several that occur on a monthly basis which are reported on the news but unfortunately they are not properly documented by the state.
Emphasizing on the need for a new law that battles violence, Azza Suliman, an Egyptian lawyer and chairwoman of the Center for Egyptian Women and Legal Assistance, believes that the trust between women and the state apparatus needs to be established again.
