Egypt man sets fire to himself after wife leaves him

An Egyptian man has set himself on fire in his wife’s family home in Giza Governorate after failing to persuade her to return to their marital home.

According to Muraselon he poured petrol over himself and then self-immolated, killing himself instantly.

The suicide comes just days after a 20-year-old engineering student threw himself from the top of the 187-metre Cairo Tower to commit suicide after going through a psychological crisis.

Suicide rates in Egypt have gone up in the last two years as the cost of living and the unemployment level has raised. The Egyptian National Centre for Criminal and Social Studies has said that 25 per cent of Egyptians suffer from mental illness which leads 60 per cent of them to commit suicide. One in three Egyptians live below the poverty line.

On 3 December another Egyptian man set fire to his wife in the Rod El Farag district of Cairo because she was allegedly infertile because she didn’t get pregnant over the course of their three-year marriage.

Egypt: Man sets fire to wife who didn’t get pregnant

In July a video circulated on social media showing a young man chasing his 60-year-old father and setting him on fire, then holding him down to prevent the flames from being extinguished. Eventually, bystanders managed to put the fire out.

In October 2016 an Egyptian taxi driver, 30, set fire to himself in front of an army centre in Alexandria in protest against high prices in the country and poor living conditions. The news of his self-immolation was circulated on Twitter under the hashtag “Bouazizi_Egypt”.

It was self-immolation of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi that sparked the Arab Spring in 2010. One month later two Egyptians set fire to themselves in front of parliament within 26 hours.

In the following five years after Bouazizi’s death in Tunisia, the amount of people setting fire to themselves tripled every year, according to one study.

Immediately after he set fire to himself four people self-immolated in Algeria in one week and one set fire to himself near the parliament in Mauritania.

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