Rania, 27, travelled with her husband and two children to Alexandria, northern Egypt, for a holiday on the Mediterranean coast. She never returned home alive. She was killed by a beach worker in the El-Agami area after a dispute over a seat overlooking the sea.

The incident, which took place on an Egyptian beach recently, was not a scene from a dramatic film. It was a real-life episode in a wave of violent killings that has shocked Egyptians throughout August.

The country has been rocked by a series of family killings and bloody massacres that have claimed dozens of lives in the space of a single month. The spate of violence has raised questions about the increase in killings and the increasingly disturbing targeting of parents, spouses and other relatives.

In Sohag Governorate in Upper Egypt, an Egyptian man who had been working in Libya returned home after receiving photographs of his wife in intimate positions with another man and suspecting that she was having an affair. He killed his wife and two others with a knife, boasting that he had avenged his honour. The incident became known in the Egyptian media as the “Sohag massacre”.

About two weeks ago, an Egyptian engineer opened fire during a reconciliation meeting with his former wife’s family. He had concealed the weapon beneath his clothes. Four people were killed, including two of his former wife’s brothers, one of her relatives and his own daughter, in 15 May City, south of Cairo.

In the affluent Al-Tagamoa area of north-eastern Cairo, a family friend reportedly shot dead a man, his wife and their two daughters after the man refused to lend him money.

Two of the most horrific killings reported in August involved close family members. In Cairo’s Al-Zeitoun district, an unemployed man killed his mother and concealed her body inside a wall he built in her bedroom. Her remains were discovered two years later. In another case, a lawyer stabbed his father 16 times during a family dispute in Al-Matariya, eastern Cairo

The wave of violence has continued, with increasingly brutal cases reported across the country. A pharmacist in Dakahlia Governorate in the Nile Delta reportedly killed her eight-year-old son with a pair of metal scissors, allegedly after suffering a mental breakdown following her separation from her husband a year earlier. In Monufia Governorate, north of Cairo, a man stabbed his brother to death following a family........

© Middle East Monitor