Authorities execute student who killed female student

Egyptian authorities have executed the student who was convicted of killing a female student at Mansoura University last year.

Mohamed Adel’s death sentence was carried out in the Gamasa prison on 14 June after the Court of Cassation upheld the death sentence in February, according to local media.

Adel, a third-year student in the faculty of arts at Mansoura University, was convicted for stabbing and killing 21-year-old fellow student Nayera Ashraf on 20 June 2022 at the gate of the university.

A hashtag, #Nayera Ashraf, was launched on social media following the execution.

In addition to the Mansoura case, two other incidents occurred in 2022.

According to reports, the court also handed a death sentence in November 2022 to 22-year-old Islam Mohamed, who killed 20-year-old female student, Salma Bahgat, who was studying at the faculty of mass communication at Shorouk Academy. Bahgat was stabbed at the entrance to a building in the city of Zagazig on 9 August 2022.

Mohamed is still awaiting the Court of Cassation’s final decision, which will determine whether his sentence will stand or whether it will be commuted.

In another incident, 19-year-old Amani Abdel Karim Al-Jazzar, a third-year student at the faculty of physical education at Menoufia University was shot by 29-year-old Ahmed Fathi Amira, but he took his own life after the killing.

Values in society

Professor Hamed Ead, who is based in the faculty of science, Cairo University, and is the former cultural counsellor at the Egyptian Embassy in Morocco, described the incidents as “exceptional”.

But, he told University World News, they should not be ignored.

“These killing incidents are a bell call for the university community to preserve and elevate values among students and among all university employees,” Ead said.

Ead’s view is mirrored in the 2022 Egyptian study titled, ‘The university and the promotion of moral values in the era of the fourth industrial revolution: Suggested vision’, which stated that universities are educational institutions that have to build values in all their moral, psychological, social, intellectual and behavioural fields. It is the educational institution that is responsible for promoting and consolidating the concepts of moral values in society.

“Within any society, moral values are important … and, therefore, any imbalance that affects moral values will inevitably reflect on the safety of individuals and the whole community,” the Egyptian study notes.

Moral education

Magdi Tawfik Abdelhamid, a professor at Cairo’s National Research Centre, told University World News: “With the tragic end of the Mansoura University and Menoufia University cases and the possible similar end for the Shorouk Academy case, along with the airwaves and media outlets filled with stories of university student misbehaviour on campus, it is time for our universities to not only focus on producing graduates with well-trained minds … but [who can] also act in a responsible and balanced way at a moral level.”

“There are two questions that must be asked now: ‘What are universities for?’ And: ‘Who do they serve?’,” Abdelhamid said.

“Universities have a major influence on the development of the character of undergraduate students, who are between late adolescence and early adulthood …

“Universities, therefore, must focus on producing graduates who are ready for life at both professional and personal level,” Abdelhamid said.

Abdelhamid’s view is in line with the 2021 study, ‘Ways to Strengthen the Effectiveness of Moral Education Courses in Colleges and Universities’, which indicated that universities should focus on talent training, actively explore effective ways of moral education, and realise the educational goal of an all-round development of university students.

“While university students can be good at scientific subjects, they may lack basic humanity or human interaction skills,” Abdelhamid added. He also proposed moral education and the teaching of ethics.

Moral education, according to research, is understood as the process of transmitting, connecting and developing in learners the necessary knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and skills in life.

Comprehensive effort needed

Dr Birgit Schreiber, the senior associate for the organisation Universities South Africa’s Higher Education Leadership and Management programme, or HELM, told University World News: “These killing incidents are a social issue – it concerns all of us.

“Each man and woman is implicated in a culture that tolerates gender violence as we have seen in this case and as is perpetrated in minor and major ways across most cultures and societies,” Schreiber said.

“Each one of us needs to stand up and challenge the gender imbalances and gender violence tolerated within our cultures,” added Schreiber, who is also the vice-president of the International Association of Student Affairs and Services (IASAS).

“Although this incident is not unique or a specific issue for universities, universities do have a unique opportunity to impact the youth to create a better world and this is where we can become impactful,” Schreiber pointed out.

“Universities – all academic programmes, formal and informal structures, curricula, students and staff – have a duty to examine, challenge and change how they perpetuate gender injustices,” noted Schreiber, who is also a member of the Africa Centre for Transregional Research, University of Freiburg, Germany.

“The lessons we are learning from this and many other incidents is that we need a comprehensive review of student and staff communities and cultures, and critically interrogate ourselves as to our own role in maintaining a culture, social structures, [and the] implicitly and explicitly held assumptions that maintain the gender imbalances in our spaces,” Schreiber said.

“As such, social programmes for students only are probably missing the mark – a much larger effort is needed,” she concluded.