Teenage social media influencer killed for rejecting man's advances
A teenage female TikTok star was shot and killed by a man for rejecting his desperate advances, in a cold-blooded murder that shocked Pakistan with a history plagued with crimes against women.
Sana Yousaf, 17, was shot at by the man who sneaked into her house in the capital Islamabad on Monday night and killed her in front of her mother, local police chief Ali Nasir Rizvi said.
The police on Tuesday arrested the 22-year-old culprit from the city of Faisalabad in the central province of Punjab after several raids, online surveillance of security cameras and tracing of mobile phone locations, Rizvi said.
The man confessed to his crime.
'It was a case of repeated rejections. The boy was trying to reach out to her time and again,' the police chief said at a press conference. "It was a gruesome and cold-blooded murder.'
Yousaf, hailing from the remote town of Chitral near the Afghan border, had more than 800,000 followers on the popular social media app TikTok. She had another half a million followers on Instagram.
Pakistan, a Muslim majority nation with a population of more than 240 million, has a history of violence against women, and murders for the rejection of marriage proposals have cropped up in the past.
A US-Pakistani man beheaded his girlfriend in Islamabad in 2021 after she rejected his marriage proposal, in a crime that drew a global spotlight on the crisis in the country.
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