The former partner of Ugandan athlete Rebecca Cheptegei, who is accused of killing her by covering her in petrol and setting her on fire, has passed away as a result of the injuries he received during the attack, according to the Kenyan hospital where he was being treated for burns sustained during the attack. The hospital announced on Tuesday that he had passed away as a result of the injuries he received during the attack.
Cheptegei, who was 33 years old and had raced in the marathon at the Olympic Games in Paris, was injured in the incident that took place on September 1. She sustained burns across more than 75% of her body as a result of the tragedy. After a period of four days, she passed away.
According to Daniel Lang’at, a spokesperson at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, western Kenya, where Cheptegei was also treated and ultimately passed dead, Dickson Ndiema Marangach, her ex-boyfriend, passed away on Monday at approximately 7.50 p.m. local time. A treatment was also provided for Cheptegei at the hospital. What Lang’at said in an interview with Reuters was that “He died as a result of his injuries, the burns he sustained.”
It is the third high-level athlete to be slain in Kenya since October 2021, and Cheptegei, who finished 44th in Paris, is the victim of this crime. Her murder took place in the nation in where they were born. As a result of her passing, the problem of domestic violence in the East African nation has been brought to the forefront, particularly within the community of people who run in the country.
Rights organisations assert that female athletes in Kenya are at a high risk of being exploited and subjected to violence at the hands of men. This is due to the fact that the prize money that they receive is far higher than the average salary in Kenya.
The official statistics from 2022 indicates that approximately 34 percent of Kenyan girls and women between the ages of 15 and 49 had been victims of physical abuse at some point in their adult lives. When it comes to the likelihood of being victims of such abuse, married women are at an exceptionally high risk. With regard to the poll that was carried out in the year 2022, it was found that forty-one percent of married women had been victims of some kind of physical or sexual violence.
According to the findings of a study that was carried out by the United Nations Women in the year 2023, a woman is murdered by a member of her own family somewhere in the world around every eleven minutes.