A student in Egypt carried out a heinous act of murder against a young lady after she rejected his proposal of marriage. They were both students at the same institution. The CCTV cameras and several spectators saw the stabbing of 21-year-old Naira Ashraf Abdel Qader on Monday morning as she entered the gate of Mansoura University.
According to sources, the suspect, identified as Mohamed Adel, was a third-year student in the university’s Arts department. A criminal court has taken him into custody and he will be tried for first-degree murder in a hearing scheduled for Sunday, according to the Middle East Monitor.
Prosecutors in Egypt said that Adel had been chasing Ashraf for over a year and a half. She had even blocked him on social media. Following his arrest at the site, he was brought into jail, where he stated that as Ashraf “became famous” on social media and accumulated a following, he felt angered, and as a result, he proceeded to murder her. He was taken into custody following his arrest at the scene.
Eyewitnesses have said that Adel first assaulted Ashraf until she fell and banged her head on the concrete. After she was down, Adel then allegedly stabbed her many times in the neck and body. He made an attempt to get away, but the other individuals who were there instantly seized him and held him there until the police arrived.
It was disclosed by Egyptian media person Najum Masria that Ashraf Abdelkader’s daughter was being harassed and threatened by the murderer. Adel had set up a slew of phony social media identities in order to track her down.
A police report was filed after a relative reported receiving repeated death threats, but nothing was done. CNN stated that Abdelkader had to petition for a restraining order in April. “She did not want to get married, she wanted to follow her career… and wanted to be a flight attendant,” the grieving father added.
The horrific video showing the whole stabbing has also gone viral on social media, with hundreds of thousands of people re-sharing and re-tweeting the event with the hashtag #Justice for Naira Ashraf.
The Egyptian government’s large-scale initiatives for the preservation of the rights to privacy, freedom of speech, and non-discrimination of female social media influencers have been criticized by human rights experts.
“Ashraf’s murder is not an isolated incident,” says Lobna Darwish, a gender and human rights officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). Darwish says there are numerous incidents like Ashraf’s reported on the news each month, but the state does not adequately record them.