Man on trial over high-profile murder

An Egyptian man accused of stabbing a woman to death in a public street after she rejected his advances has gone on trial. A video went viral last week appearing to show the victim, identified as student Nayera Ashraf, being stabbed by a young man outside her university. A report on the EWN site notes that the crime was followed a few days later by a similar incident in which a Jordanian student was shot dead on a university campus. At the Mansoura Criminal Court north of Cairo, Mohamed Adel was accused of ‘premeditated murder’, after confessing to intentionally killing the victim. The prosecution said it found ‘messages threatening to cut her throat’ on the victim's phone. The maximum penalty for murder is death in Egypt, which carried out the third-highest number of executions in the world in 2021, according to Amnesty International.’ The next hearing is set for today. In a rare occurrence among cases involving violence against women, authorities have allowed television cameras to film the hearing.