Rebecca Cheptegei, an Olympian from Uganda, was accused of lighting her on fire by her ex-boyfriend, who passed away from burns he received in the altercation.
The 33-year-old Cheptegei passed away last week from burns that covered roughly 80% of her body. Over a land dispute, her ex-partner Dickson Ndiema Marangach is accused of dousing her in petrol and setting her on fire. It wasn’t long ago that she participated in the Olympic marathon in Paris.
On Monday, Marangach passed away from his own burn wounds, the Kenyan hospital where he was receiving treatment announced. Local media said that he was set on fire and that he had burns to about thirty per cent of his body when some of the petrol used in the attack splattered on him.
“He developed respiratory failure as a result of the severe airway burns and sepsis that led to his eventual death on Monday evening at 18:30 hours despite life-saving measures,” a press release from Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital said, according to the BBC.
Cheptegei lived close to the Kenyan-Uganda border in western Trans Nzoia County, where the incident took place on September 1. Despite living in Kenya, Cheptegei was an Olympic competitor for Uganda. Per her parents, the long-distance runner purchased land in Trans Nzoia in order to be close to the several athletic training facilities in the county.
According to BBC News, Marangach allegedly set up an ambush in his ex-girlfriend’s home as she came home from church with her kids. It is thought that following their argument over the Trans Nzoia property, he broke into Cheptegei’s house covertly carrying a five-litre jerry can of petrol.
Since Marangach passed away as well, the criminal case against him has been discontinued, and an inquest into the deaths of the two people will be conducted by the authorities in place of the main suspect in Cheptegei’s murder investigation.
Cheptegei is the third elite athlete to die in Kenya since October 2021. She placed 44th in the Paris Marathon. Her passing has raised awareness of domestic abuse in the nation of East Africa, especially among the running community.
Rights groups claim that female athletes in Kenya, where a large number of international runners train in the highlands at high altitudes, are highly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by men who are attracted to their prize money, which is significantly more than what is paid to locals.
“Justice really would have been for him to sit in jail and think about what he had done. This is not positive news whatsoever,” said Viola Cheptoo, co-founder of Tirop’s Angels, a support group for survivors of domestic violence in Kenya’s athletic community.
“The shock of Rebecca’s death is still fresh,” Cheptoo told Reuters.
In honour of Agnes Tirop, a rising star in Kenya’s fiercely competitive sports scene who was discovered dead in her Iten, Kenya, home in October 2021 from multiple neck stab wounds, Cheptoo co-founded Tirop’s Angels.
Tirop’s husband, Ibrahim Rotich, was accused of killing her and entered a not-guilty plea. The legal matter is still pending.
Government data from 2022 indicates that over 34% of Kenyan girls and women between the ages of 15 and 49 had experienced physical violence, with married women being particularly vulnerable. According to a survey conducted in 2022, 41% of married women reported experiencing violence.
A 2023 U.N. Women research states that a woman is killed worldwide every 11 minutes by a member of her own family.
