Murder of Marwa El-Sherbini

 Marwa El-Sherbini was born in Alexandria in 1977. She was the daughter of Ali El-Sherbini and Laila Shams, both of whom are chemists. During her schooling at the English Girls’ College in Alexandria, she was head girl. She went on to study pharmacy, successfully completing her degree in 2000. From 1992 to 1999, she also played for the Egyptian women’s national handball team. 

In 2005, Marwa El-Sherbini came to Germany together with her husband, the geneticist Elwi Ali Okaz. Their son was born in 2006. In 2008, Okaz obtained a doctoral research position at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, and the family moved to Dresden.

At a playground in Dresden in August 2008, Marwa El-Sherbini was verbally abused and called an “Islamist” and “terrorist” by Alex Wiens, an ethnic German immigrant from Russia. The police were contacted and Wiens was charged.  At the court hearing on 1st July 2009, Alex Wiens killed Marwa El-Sherbini just as she was about to leave the courtroom after giving her testimony, and critically wounded her husband. The public prosecutor’s office spoke of a lone perpetrator, acting with “an extreme xenophobic motivation”. On 11th November 2009, the Dresden Regional Court sentenced Alex Wiens to life imprisonment for murder.

In 2022 The Mayor of Dresden, Dirk Hilbert, has announced that a major park in the German city is being renamed in memory of Marwa El-Sherbini was three months pregnant when she was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom in front of her husband and child.

The naming of the park coincides with the start of the “International Weeks against Racism”. The step comes to shed light on the crimes hate crimes borne from racism at the damage they cause, aiming to raise awareness of the danger of the extremist right-wing ideas to society.