Warning: This story incorporates particulars of gender-based violence and homicide.
A Ugandan Olympic athlete residing in Kenya was attacked and set on hearth by a person believed to be her boyfriend and suffered burns on 80 per cent of her physique, Kenyan police and medical officers mentioned.
Police say Rebecca Cheptegei was attacked on Sunday at her home within the city of Endebess in western Trans Nzoia County, located alongside the Kenya-Uganda border.
Trans Nzoia County Police Commander Jeremiah ole Kosiom mentioned Monday that Dickson Ndiema Marangach, the Kenyan man reported to be Cheptegei’s boyfriend, purchased a jerrycan of gasoline, poured it on her and set her ablaze following a disagreement.
Kenya’s The Nation reported that 33-year-old Cheptegei had been at church together with her two kids Sunday afternoon earlier than the assault occurred and that, in response to a report filed by a neighborhood chief, Marangach snuck into her dwelling whereas she was out.
The native chief’s report acknowledged that earlier than the hearth began, the pair was heard preventing over the land on which the home was constructed.
Marangach additionally sustained burn wounds to 30 per cent of his physique, in response to Kenya’s The Star.
The two have been handled within the intensive care unit on the Moi Educating and Referral Hospital within the metropolis of Eldoret, 90 kilometres south of the city the place the assault occurred.
Kenyan authorities sports activities official Peter Tum mentioned Wednesday there are plans to airlift Cheptegei to capital metropolis Nairobi, the place medical doctors can present her with specialised therapy.
Cheptegei’s mother and father mentioned their daughter purchased land in Trans Nzoia to be close to the county’s many athletic coaching centres.
Her household, talking to reporters exterior the hospital on Tuesday, disputed the declare that Marangach was her boyfriend, saying they had been mates who had beforehand stayed collectively when she educated in Kenya.
Cheptegei completed forty fourth within the girls’s marathon on the 2024 Paris Olympics final month. She additionally holds the Ugandan girls’s marathon report of two:22:47, which she set in the course of the Abu Dhabi Marathon in December 2022.
Runners misplaced to gender-based violence
The assault on Cheptegei is the most recent violent assault in opposition to a famous feminine runner in Kenya in a brief span of time.
Kenyan lengthy distance runner Agnes Jebet Tirop was killed in October 2021, simply months after she competed in the 2020 Olympic Video games in Tokyo and completed fourth within the girls’s 5,000-metre last. She was additionally a two-time, 10,000-metre bronze medallist on the World Athletics Championships.
The 25-year-old was discovered stabbed to demise in her dwelling, within the high-altitude western Kenyan city of Iten, a hub for distance working coaching centres.
Police arrested her husband, Ibrahim Rotich, within the coastal metropolis of Mombasa following a manhunt. Authorities allege he was attempting to flee the nation.
He later pleaded not responsible to her homicide. He was launched on bail in November 2023.
Her demise sparked an outcry and led to the formation of a bunch referred to as Tirop’s Angels, which seeks to teach about and eradicate gender-based violence.
In April 2022, Kenyan-born Bahraini athlete Damaris Muthee Mutua was discovered lifeless close to the city of Iten, at the house of Ethiopian runner Koki Foi, who was reported to be her boyfriend.
A postmortem report acknowledged that the 28-year-old was strangled. Police consider Foi fled the nation.
Their deaths are part of what some activists have described as a silent epidemic of gender-based violence in Kenya.
Kenya’s Demographic and Well being Survey of 2023 discovered that greater than 11 million girls — or 20 per cent of the inhabitants — have skilled bodily or sexual violence from an intimate accomplice throughout their lives, with 2.8 million of these girls having skilled such a violence within the pervious 12 months.
Odipo Dev, a Kenyan analysis agency, says no less than 500 girls in Kenya had been killed due to their gender from January 2016 to December 2023.
