Uganda’s Rebecca Cheptegei (third from left), died after being set on fireplace in her house. The person who allegedly attacked her has additionally died, in a case that has renewed requires extra consciousness and protections for girls in opposition to home violence in Kenya.
FERENC ISZA/AFP through Getty Photographs/AFP
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FERENC ISZA/AFP through Getty Photographs/AFP
A person who allegedly poured gasoline on Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei and set her on fireplace, killing her, has additionally died of burns, in line with the hospital the place the 2 had been handled.
Dickson Ndiema Marangach died on the Moi Educating and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya, the place distance runner Cheptegei died days in the past. Cheptegei — who competed within the Paris Olympics simply weeks in the past — had been primarily based in Kenya, the place many elite runners practice.
“The two are reported to have quarrelled earlier over a piece of land where Cheptegei had built her house in Kenya’s Rift Valley,” Nairobi journalist Emmanuel Igunza reported for NPR’s Newscast. “The athlete’s family said it had previously reported Marangach to authorities over harassment of their daughter, but no action was taken.”
The assault on Cheptegei, 33, happened in her house in western Kenya final Sunday; her loss of life was introduced on Thursday. She reportedly suffered burns on 75%-80% of her physique, with Marangach struggling burns on 30%.
Honors and condolences have been pouring in for Cheptegei, together with a second of appreciation for her on Sunday, throughout the Paralympic Video games in Paris. The mom of two had served in Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces — and her household tells Kenya’s The Star newspaper that Cheptegei will probably be buried with full army honors on Saturday.
Her fellow athletes say that Cheptegei’s tragic loss of life highlights an unsettling development of violence in opposition to feminine runners specifically and girls in Kenya general.
“It is sad because we are reminded of what happened to Agnes Tirop,” stated Viola Cheptoo, a Kenyan runner who chairs Tirop’s Angels, an advocacy and help group working in opposition to gender-based violence. The group is called for Tirop, Kenyan athlete who had been a rising star earlier than she was stabbed to loss of life shortly after returning house from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
“I feel like the same thing is happening over and over again,” Cheptoo stated.
Femicide in Kenya is “a menace, it’s a pandemic,” she added.
Tirop died in Iten, a small group within the Rift Valley’s excessive altitude that has an outsized standing within the operating world. It has additionally developed a repute as a spot the place males search to make the most of feminine athletes whose successes in monitor and discipline may convey a payday.
Because the advocacy group Usikimye notes, no less than three different feminine runners have been killed in Kenya — their deaths blamed on husbands or boyfriends — in recent times. The identical week Tirop died in 2021, runner Edith Muthoni was murdered in a home northeast of Nairobi. One 12 months later, Damaris Mutua was strangled in Iten. Now Cheptegei, who died in her house in Trans Nzoia county close to Iten, is added to that toll.
“All these athletes have risen to the top of their careers and have been cut down” by males, Usikimye stated. “The centre of their rows have been finances.”
The Kenya Nationwide Bureau of Statistics says greater than a 3rd of ladies in Kenya say they’ve skilled bodily violence after age 15 — and the numbers are even worse if a lady is in a relationship. In its 2022 Demographic and Well being Survey, the company reported that “37% of women who are currently married or living together have ever experienced physical violence.”
Amongst ladies who skilled bodily or sexual violence in that authorities report, the identical proportion — 42% — stated that they had sought assist as those that stated they by no means instructed anybody and by no means sought assist to cease the violence.
As she spoke about the necessity to defend ladies and athletes, Cheptoo famous an notorious case from earlier this 12 months, when a person named Collins Jumaisi Khalusha allegedly confessed to killing 42 ladies over the course of roughly two years. Three weeks in the past, Khalusha escaped from a Kenyan police station the place he was being held in custody. His and different prisoners’ escape was discovered to be an inside job.
