Another Kenyan marathoner killed by husband
The murder scene in the training hub, on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley, is only 1km from where Tirop was found dead six months ago
A second Kenyan female athlete has been killed in the high-altitude training town of Iten where, only months ago, the women’s 10km world-record holder Agnes Tirop was found stabbed to death.
The body of Damaris Muthee Mutua, a 28-year-old distance runner who competed for Bahrain, was discovered on Tuesday at the home of her boyfriend, an Ethiopian athlete, who is now being hunted by police.
The killing — and its striking similarity to Tirop’s murder in October, for which her husband was charged — looks set to reignite the fury that followed Tirop’s death and a deeper reckoning by Kenya’s sports authorities, who have admitted that female stars are more likely to experience abuse, often at the hands of their partners, than success.
“According to Mutua’s immediate neighbour, her boyfriend was seen in the house on Sunday morning. It’s likely that the incident happened late Saturday or early Sunday since the body was in a state of decomposition,” Tom Makori, Iten’s police chief, said, adding that strangulation was the likely cause of death.
The murder scene in the training hub, on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley, is only 1km from where Tirop was found dead six months ago.
Mutua’s boyfriend, who is reported to have fled to his native Ethiopia, was named by police as Eskanda Hailemariam.
Mutua competed for Kenya as a junior athlete and won two bronze medals at the 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in Singapore and the East African junior athletics championships in Khartoum, Sudan, before switching her allegiance to Bahrain. Friends described her as a dedicated athlete and mother to her young son.
Tirop, who was 25, was a rising star in long-distance running and a two-times World Championship bronze medallist. Seb Coe, the president of World Athletics, described her as “one of the world’s best female distance runners over the past six years”.
The outpouring sparked by her murder, a month after she set a world record and two months after running at the Tokyo Olympics, hinted at a turning point for Kenya in tackling the abuse and violence against its female athletics stars that had barely been acknowledged.
Tirop’s estranged husband Emmanuel Ibrahim Rotich, who was formerly her coach and facing a murder trial, denies any wrongdoing. The runner was found in her bedroom after bleeding to death from stab wounds to her neck and stomach. Rotich was arrested two days later in the coastal city of Mombasa, 500 miles from Iten, after ramming his car into a lorry while trying to escape police.
