Pakistani police on Tuesday said a 17-year-old TikTok star was shot dead by a man who had repeatedly contacted her online.
Sana Yousaf, who turned 17 last week and had more than a million followers across her social media accounts, was killed at her home in the capital Islamabad on Monday evening.
The police have arrested a 22-year-old on suspicion of her murder who spent hours loitering outside her home.
“It was a case of repeated rejections. The boy was trying to reach out to her time and again,” Islamabad police chief Syed Ali Nasir Rizvi said during a news conference.
“It was a gruesome and cold-blooded murder,” Rizvi added.
Yousaf had more than 800,000 followers on TikTok, a wildly popular platform in Pakistan, where she posted lip-sync videos, skincare tips, and promotional content for beauty products.
The last video posted on her account was hours before her murder, in which she was seen cutting a cake for her birthday.
Some comments under social media posts sharing the news of Yousaf’s murder suggested it was justified because of her social media career, in a society where honour codes restrict how women should behave.
“You reap what you sow,” said one comment.
Women’s rights activist Nighat Dad such reactions embolden abusers to “silence women who dare to be visible”.
“The vile comments under news of Sana’s murder aren’t just hateful noise, they’re part of a mindset that normalizes violence against women in Pakistan,” she posted online.
Violence against women is pervasive in Pakistan according to the country’s Human Rights Commission, and cases of women being attacked after rejecting marriage proposals are not uncommon.
In 2021, 27-year-old Noor Mukadam was beheaded by her Pakistani-American boyfriend, Zahir Jaffer, after she rejected his marriage proposal in a case that sparked widespread anger.
In 2016, Khadija Siddiqui survived being stabbed 23 times by a jilted ex-boyfriend.
