Death
On 19 August 2012, the Corriere della Sera reported that Samia had died while on her way to Italy on a boat from Libya. The information came from her compatriot and fellow runner Abdi Bile, and was "difficult to verify" according to the newspaper. In response to the news, Al Jazeera journalist Teresa Krug, who had previously interviewed Samia and maintained contact with her, reported that Samia had left Ethiopia in 2011, crossed the Sudan and reached Libya, where she was imprisoned for a time for unspecified reasons. She had hoped to reach Italy and find a coach to train for the 2012 London Games. Krug told Rina Brundu of Rosebud: "From the news reports—and her older sister, who had the death confirmed by a fellow passenger—I think the boat accident happened early April 2012. However, this did not come to my attention until a couple weeks ago when Abdi Bile informed the rest of the world".
On 20 August, the BBC reported that it had received confirmation of Samia's death from Somalia's National Olympic Committee. By 21 August, wider English-language media had begun to pick up on the story. The Associated Press reported that Qadijo Aden Dahir, the Deputy Chairman for Somalia's athletics federation, had confirmed that Samia had drowned off the Libyan seaboard in July while trying to reach Italy from her home in Ethiopia. Qadijo added that "it's a sad death...She was our favorite for the London Olympics."
Read more about this topic: Samia Yusuf Omar
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him meerly seise me, and onely declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwrack, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?””
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)