A nineteen-year-old Egyptian woman was killed by a deliberate gunshot wound, on 3 September by her neighbor Ahmad Fathi Ameirah, 29, after her parents refused his request to marry her, according to a press statement by the Public Prosecution Office. The victim has been identified as Amani Al-Gazzar, a physical education student. On 4 September, Egypt’s Ministry of Interior announced that the perpetrator’s corpse was found on the Alexandria-Agricultural Road, and his death was ruled as suicide by gunshot – the same gun used on Al-Gazzar. “The Prosecutor General general quickly ordered the investigations to end and arrest the accused [who initially fled the scene] along with obtaining his phone and weapon,” reads the statement. Al-Gazzar was murdered in Birket El-Sabe’, a city in Egypt’s Al-Menoufia governorate, 80 kilometers north of Cairo. News of her death quickly spread through social media, causing public outrage. Speak Up, an Egyptian feminist initiative with a combined 800 thousand followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, was one of the first popular pages to share the news. Al-Gazzar’s murder reminds Egyptians once more of the increasingly frequent pattern of femicides occurring this year across the…
