The man who attacked Ugandan runner Rebecca Cheptegei has died from injuries sustained when he poured petrol over the Olympic athlete, the Kenyan hospital treating him said Tuesday.
Police said that Dickson Ndiema Marangach assaulted Cheptegei in her home in western Kenya on September 1.
The mother-of-two sustained 80 percent burns and died last week.
Marangach also suffered 30% burns during the attack and was being treated in the intensive care unit at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) in the Rift Valley city of Eldoret.
“It’s true we lost Dickson Ndiema last night at about 8:00 pm,” an official at the hospital’s communications department told AFP, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.
The official informed his family and promised to release a “comprehensive statement” later.
People in the East African nation have responded to the attack on the 33-year-old Cheptegei with sorrow and anger, viewing it as yet another horrifying instance of gender-based violence.
Since 2021, at least two other athletes have lost their lives at the hands of their partners.
The country’s Olympic Committee has scheduled Cheptegei’s burial for September 14 near her family home in eastern Uganda.
Local media reported that Cheptegei’s daughters witnessed the attack, which occurred just weeks after she made her Olympic debut in the women’s marathon at the Paris Games, where she finished 44th.
Police said Marangach snuck into her home in Endebess, near the border with Uganda, while she was at church with her children.
Her father, Joseph Cheptegei, told reporters that the dispute with Marangach was over the property where she lived with her sister and daughters.
He told Kenyan media last week that Marangach had bought five litres of petrol and then hid out in a chicken coop before the attack.
“He poured the petrol and lit her on fire. When she called her sister to help, he threatened her with a machete, and she ran away.”
The police said the couple had “constantly had family wrangles.”
Violence against women is widespread in Kenya, which saw 725 femicide cases in 2022 alone, according to the latest UN figures.
A 2023 report by Kenya’s National Bureau of Statistics found 34 percent of women had experienced physical violence since the age of 15.
Cheptegei’s death follows that of record-breaking Kenyan runner Agnes Tirop in 2021 and Kenyan-born Bahrain athlete Damaris Mutua the following year.
In both cases, their ex-partners were implicated in their deaths.
Tirop’s estranged partner, who denies murdering her, is on trial.
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