Rebecca Cheptegei, a Ugandan athlete, passed away days after her fiancé set her on fire

Four days after her partner in Kenya poured her in gasoline and set her on fire, Ugandan Olympic marathon runner Rebecca Cheptegei passed away on Thursday. This was the country’s latest attack on a female athlete.

The incident on Sunday left Cheptegei, 33, a competitor in the Paris Olympics, with burns over 75% of her body, according to reports from Kenyan and Ugandan media.

This makes her the third well-known athlete to pass away in Kenya since October 2021.

“After a vicious attack by her boyfriend, we have learned of the sad passing of our Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei,” Uganda Olympics Committee president Donald Rukare wrote in a post on X.

“May her gentle soul rest in peace and we strongly condemn violence against women,” he added.

After the incident, the runner, who placed 44th in Paris, was brought to a hospital in Eldoret, a city in the Kenyan Rift Valley.

Cheptegei “passed today morning at 5:30 am after her organs failed,” Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital senior director of clinical services Owen Menach told Reuters, stating that a detailed report on the circumstances of her death would be made public on Thursday afternoon.

According to doctors at the same hospital, her attacker was brought to the intensive care unit with 30% burns after sustaining injuries in the event, as reported by the Kenyan newspaper The Standard.

Kipchumba Murkomen, the minister of sports for Kenya, called Cheptegei’s passing a loss “to the entire region”.

“This tragedy is a stark reminder that we must do more to combat gender-based violence in our society, which in recent years has reared its ugly head in elite sporting circles,” he stated in a statement.

The athletics federation of Uganda demanded justice for Cheptegei.

In Eldoret, Joseph Cheptegei, the athlete’s father, told reporters he was pleading with the authorities to safeguard her kids and belongings “so that no one will get into her home and take anything.”

“The land… has brought problems,” he remarked in response to claims from the neighborhood media that the two-mother and her boyfriend had fought over property in the days before the attack.

Uganda’s state minister for sports, Peter Ogwang, claimed that Kenyan authorities were looking into the killing, which brought attention to the violence that women in the country of East Africa face.

According to government data from 2022, about 34% of Kenyan girls and women aged 15 to 49 had experienced physical violence; married women were disproportionately vulnerable.

According to the 2022 poll, 41% of married women reported experiencing violence.

According to a research released by UN Women and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, African nations as a whole had the highest number of female homicides in 2022, both in absolute terms and in relation to the number of female inhabitants on the continent.

Olympian runner Agnes Tirop, a rising star in Kenya’s fiercely competitive running scene, was discovered dead at her Iten, Kenya, home in October 2021, with numerous neck stab wounds.

Her husband, Ibrahim Rotich, has entered a not guilty plea to the murder accusation against him. The legal matter is still pending.

After the shocking death of the 25-year-old, athletes both past and present founded ‘Tirop’s Angels’ in 2022 to raise awareness of domestic abuse.

One of the non-profit’s founders, Joan Chelimo, told Reuters that female athletes were particularly vulnerable to abuse and violence at the hands of males who were attracted to them because of their wealth.

“They get into these traps of predators who pose in their lives as lovers,” she stated.