Egypt's Court of Cassation upholds death sentence against killer of 'Nayera Ashraf'

CAIRO – 9 February 2023: Egypt’s Court of Cassation upheld Thursday the death sentence against Mohamed Adel who killed his colleague Mansoura University Student Nayera Ashraf last year.

FILE - Mohamed Adel, killer of student Nayera Ashraf, during the first trial session at Mansoura Criminal Court on June 26, 2022. Egypt Today

The convict appealed the sentence in August one month after the ruling of Mansoura Criminal Court and two months after he had committed the murder.

According to investigations, Adel deliberately killed Ashraf for rejecting to marry him. He confessed that he had set a plan to commit the crime, as he waited until the victim finished her final exam and left the university campus, and then, he attacked her, slit her neck on the street and left her soaked in blood.

The crime scene was captured on camera and went viral on social media, where floods of angry comments calling for justice took over different platforms ever since.

The convict pleaded guilty before Mansoura Criminal Court in June, saying "I was fully sane when I committed the crime."

Nevertheless, his lawyer requested that he gets referred to the Forensic Medicine Authority, so it would carry out a mental check-up on his client.

The Public Prosecution noted that it had listened to several testimonials from Nayera’s friends, university workers and supervisors of the bus line, on which the murderer used to follow Nayera on her way to university every day.

The prosecution further found several threatening messages from the murderer to the victim’s mobile phone saying that he is going to kill her.

The victim’s friends and colleagues in their testimonials affirmed that the murderer used to follow Nayera, harass her and proposed more than once but she declined his request; hence, he planned to follow and murder her.