Woman confesses to murdering sister for flirting with her boyfriend in Valorant
An Orlando woman has admitted to murdering her sister for flirting with her boyfriend in Valorant, the Orlando Sentinel reports (opens in new tab). 21-year-old Fatiha Marzan was arrested by Orange County deputies on the evening of September 26, after calling police to report and confess to the crime about 15 hours after it happened.
Marzan is reported to have shared a room and bed with her 20-year-old sister Sayma, who was a Valorant player. Investigators say that Marzan regularly witnessed her long-distance boyfriend and her sister playing the game together, and perceived chat messages between the two as inappropriately flirtatious.
Although Marzan repeatedly confronted them both regarding their relationship, it seems that she never stopped regarding the pair’s bond as a threat. After learning—or at least coming to believe—that her boyfriend had told her sister that he loved her, Marzan purchased a “dagger-style knife set” from Amazon and hid it for weeks, planning to attack her sister while the rest of the household slept, according to the arrest affidavit (opens in new tab). She eventually murdered Sayma in the early hours of September 26.
The story is another episode of videogame-related violence in a series stretching back decades. Whether it’s people dying in swatting (opens in new tab) ‘pranks’, death threats to developers (opens in new tab), or murders over trivial hardware arguments (opens in new tab), there have been a fair few of these kinds of stories in the last few years alone.
Marzan called police on the evening of her sister’s murder, around 15 hours later, to report the death and confess to her crime. Sayma was declared dead by Orange County fire rescue about 20 minutes after they arrived, and Marzan was arrested. She is currently being held without bond and faces a first-degree murder charge.
