Warning: This story contains details of gender-based violence and murder.

A Ugandan Olympic athlete living in Kenya was attacked and set on fire by a man believed to be her boyfriend and suffered burns on 80 per cent of her body, Kenyan police and medical officials said. 

Police say Rebecca Cheptegei was attacked on Sunday at her house in the town of Endebess in western Trans Nzoia County, situated along the Kenya-Uganda border.

Trans Nzoia County Police Commander Jeremiah ole Kosiom said Monday that Dickson Ndiema Marangach, the Kenyan man reported to be Cheptegei’s boyfriend, bought a jerrycan of gas, poured it on her and set her ablaze following a disagreement.

Kenya’s The Nation reported that 33-year-old Cheptegei had been at church with her two children Sunday afternoon before the attack happened and that, according to a report filed by a local chief, Marangach snuck into her home while she was out. 

The local chief’s report stated that before the fire started, the pair was heard fighting over the land on which the house was built.

Marangach also sustained burn wounds to 30 per cent of his body, according to Kenya’s The Star. 

The two have been treated in the intensive care unit at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in the city of Eldoret, 90 kilometres south of the town where the attack happened.

Kenyan government sports official Peter Tum said Wednesday there are plans to airlift Cheptegei to capital city Nairobi, where doctors can provide her with specialized treatment. 

Cheptegei’s parents said their daughter bought land in Trans Nzoia to be near the county’s many athletic training centres.

Her family, speaking to reporters outside the hospital on Tuesday, disputed the claim that Marangach was her boyfriend, saying they were friends who had previously stayed together when she trained in Kenya. 

Cheptegei finished 44th in the women’s marathon at the 2024 Paris Olympics last month. She also holds the Ugandan women’s marathon record of 2:22:47, which she set during the Abu Dhabi Marathon in December 2022. 

Runners lost to gender-based violence

The attack on Cheptegei is the latest violent assault against a noted female runner in Kenya in a short span of time.

Kenyan long distance runner Agnes Jebet Tirop was killed in October 2021, just months after she competed in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo and finished fourth in the women’s 5,000-metre final. She was also a two-time, 10,000-metre bronze medallist at the World Athletics Championships. 

The 25-year-old was found stabbed to death in her home, in the high-altitude western Kenyan town of Iten, a hub for distance running training centres. 

Police arrested her husband, Ibrahim Rotich, in the coastal city of Mombasa following a manhunt. Authorities allege he was trying to flee the country.

He later pleaded not guilty to her murder. He was released on bail in November 2023. 

Her death sparked an outcry and led to the formation of a group called Tirop’s Angels, which seeks to educate about and eradicate gender-based violence. 

In April 2022, Kenyan-born Bahraini athlete Damaris Muthee Mutua was found dead near the town of Iten, at the home of Ethiopian runner Koki Foi, who was reported to be her boyfriend. 

A postmortem report stated that the 28-year-old was strangled. Police believe Foi fled the country. 

Their deaths are a part of what some activists have described as a silent epidemic of gender-based violence in Kenya.

Kenya’s Demographic and Health Survey of 2023 found that more than 11 million women — or 20 per cent of the population — have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner during their lives, with 2.8 million of those women having experienced this type of violence in the pervious 12 months.

Odipo Dev, a Kenyan research firm, says at least 500 women in Kenya were killed because of their gender from January 2016 to December 2023.