Update: Rebecca Cheptegei died of her burns on Thursday, September 5.
Rebecca Cheptegei, age 33, and a Ugandan long-distance runner who competed in the Olympic marathon in Paris, is in critical condition after her boyfriend poured gasoline on her and set her on fire, according to police in Kenya, where they were living.
According to the BBC, Cheptegei was returning home from church with her two children when she was targeted. An argument ensued and witnesses observed her boyfriend pouring a liquid on her before setting her ablaze. Her neighbors are said to be the ones who rescued her.
Cheptegei is in the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya, with burns over 75%-80% of her body, reports The New York Times. Her boyfriend, Dickson Ndiema, was also burned in the attack and is being treated in the same hospital.
Local Police Commander Jeremiah Ole Kosiom said that Ndiema bought a gas can filled with gasoline, poured it on her and set her on fire during a disagreement over land that Cheptegei had purchased to be closer to Kenya’s athletic training centers.
Cheptegei qualified to compete in the Olympic marathon after she ran a personal best of 2 hours, 22 minutes and 47 seconds at the 2022 Abu Dhabi Marathon, according to the Olympics website for the Paris Games. She came in 44th in Paris.
Cheptegei is not the only female athlete who has been attacked in recent years. In 2021, Agnes Jebet Tirop, a Kenyan long-distance runner who competed in the Tokyo Olympics and broke world records, was found stabbed to death in her home in Iten, Kenya, just five weeks after she broke a world record. Her husband, Ibrahim Rotich, a man 15 years her senior, was charged with her murder.
Rotich later admitted in an affidavit to killing Tirop, but pleaded not guilty to her murder, claiming that he was provoked into killing her because he believed she was having an affair with her childhood friend, according to an in-depth profile by Alexis Okeowo with The New Yorker.
As a result of Tirop’s death, “Tirop’s Angel’s” was formed. It is a nongovernmental organization dedicated to fighting gender-based violence in Kenya and beyond. One in three women in Kenya has experienced gender-based violence, according to a survey released last year by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. The report also said women who had “been married are much more likely to have experienced violence,” noting that 41% of such women reported incidents compared to 20% of unmarried women.
Teen pregnancy and early marriage are common, and when women marry they traditionally have little power in the household; women own less than 2% of the country’s property in their names alone, the Kenya Land Alliance notes. Domestic violence is seen as a minor offense, writes Okeowo, and some police stations still send victims back home to work things out.
Six months after Tirop was beaten and stabbed to death, another elite athlete living and training in Iten, Damaris Muthee Mutua, was found strangled in the home of her boyfriend, who has since disappeared but is believed to be hiding out in Ethiopia.
According to the United Nations, an estimated 20,000 gender-related killings of women were recorded in Africa in 2022, which has the highest rate of femicide in the world.
Originally published in the Deseret News
