US citizen shot dead by father in Quetta over TikTok videos

Police say investigation finds family objected to 15-year-old's dressing, lifestyle, social gathering

By: REUTERS

January 29, 2025January 29, 2025

TikTok deletes 25m videos uploaded by Pakistani users in 3 months (Courtesy: File)

A man who had recently brought his family back to Pakistan from the United States on Wednesday confessed to shooting dead his teenage daughter, motivated by his disapproval of her TikTok content, Pakistani police said.

The shooting happened on a street in Quetta on Tuesday. The suspect, Anwarul Haq, initially said that unidentified gunmen shot and killed his American-born, 15-year-old daughter before he confessed to the crime, police official Babar Baloch said.

"Our investigation so far has found that the family had an objection to her dressing, lifestyle, and social gathering," another police investigator, Zohaib Mohsin, said. "We have her phone. It is locked," he told Reuters. "We are probing all aspects, including honour killing."

The family had recently returned to Balochistan province in predominantly Muslim Pakistan, a nation with conservative social norms, having lived in the United States for about 25 years, Baloch said.

The suspect has U.S. citizenship, the officer said. He said Haq had told him his daughter began creating "objectionable" content on the social media platform TikTok when she lived in the United States.

He told police that she continued to share videos on the platform after returning to Pakistan. Baloch said the main suspect's brother-in-law had also been arrested in connection with the killing.

Police said they had charged Haq with the murder. They did not offer proof of Haq's U.S. citizenship except for the suspect's own testimony and declined to say whether the U.S. embassy had been informed of the incident.

His family declined to respond to a Reuters' request for comment.

More than 54 million people use TikTok in Pakistan, a nation of 241 million. The government has blocked the video-sharing app several times in recent years over content moderation.

Islamabad often takes issue with what it terms "obscene content" with the social media platform, which has lately started complying with requests from Pakistan to remove certain content.