By Staff Reporter
RAWALPINDI: For nine days, the killing of a TikTok star known to more than a million followers as Ayesha Gilamana had the shape of a familiar tragedy: a young woman gunned down by men chasing an unpaid debt, her grieving father the one who ran to police.
By Saturday, investigators were telling a different story. The father, they said, was the one who ordered her death.
Police in Rawalpindi announced the arrests of five people, including the woman’s father and brother, in connection with her killing, alleging that what was first reported as a random roadside attack tied to a financial dispute was in fact a family conspiracy carried out, they said, in the name of honor.
The victim, 28-year-old Shamsoo Bibi, performed under the name Ayesha Gilamana and had built an online following of roughly 1.3 million people on TikTok over three or four years of posting videos, along with more than 170,000 subscribers on YouTube. She was shot on Aug. 14 in Taxila, a town roughly 20 miles from Islamabad, while riding in a car with her teenage sister and her brother.
The account of that day has remained consistent since it was first reported: Bibi received a phone call from a man her father identified as Kashif, or “Kashi,” and left the house with her siblings soon after. Gunmen opened fire on the vehicle. Bibi was shot and later died; her sister was injured when the car went out of control.
In the police complaint her father filed in the killing’s immediate aftermath, he named two other men, identified as Kausar and a man known as Javed or Shaheen, saying his daughter had sold them a plot of land and had been threatened after pressing them for the money she was owed. Police at the time said the men were from Lower Dir district, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and that raid teams had been sent out to find them.
That version of events held for more than a week. Then it began to fall apart.
Senior Superintendent of Police Malik Tariq Mehboob told reporters Saturday that as investigators broadened the inquiry, evidence increasingly pointed not outward, toward strangers, but inward, toward Bibi’s own household. He said the family had disapproved of her social media career, and that the disagreement over her TikTok presence had become a persistent source of conflict at home.
Investigators reviewed footage from more than 100 surveillance cameras and drew on intelligence sources to reconstruct the circumstances of the shooting, Mehboob said. That work, along with what police described as inconsistencies in the family’s original account, led them back to Bibi’s father and brother, who were brought in for questioning. Police allege both men confessed to arranging the killing with the help of other relatives — an account they said unraveled what had initially been treated as a “blind murder,” a case with no identified suspects.
“Father has a role in it, then there is his brother, then his cousin, his paternal cousin … and then another cousin. These cousins and family members were involved,” Mehboob said, adding that the investigation had widened as technical evidence accumulated.
Among the most jarring details investigators disclosed Saturday: the father who filed the original police complaint attributing his daughter’s death to a debt dispute was, according to police, involved in planning her killing from the start. Mehboob said the initial complaint was allegedly an effort to mislead investigators and steer the case away from the family.
He also said police believe an earlier attempt was made on Bibi’s life, at a wedding in Haripur, and that she survived only because she changed her route.
Police identified those arrested as Bibi’s father and brother, along with three additional relatives — accounts differed Saturday on precisely how those extended family members were related to her, with police describing them variously as cousins and an uncle in different statements to reporters. The two men accused of firing on the car are also in custody, and Mehboob said at least one suspect has confessed during questioning.
Mehboob cautioned that the investigation remains open and that additional details could surface as police prepare to submit their findings to the courts.
“The investigation is still ongoing,” he said. “The roles of the other individuals still have to be determined.”
The case has drawn renewed attention to violence against women in Pakistan, and in particular to the risks faced by women who have built public profiles online. TikTok has an enormous following in the country, and Pakistani women who post on the platform have increasingly become targets of threats and, in a number of recent cases, killings that authorities have described as motivated by honor. Bibi’s TikTok and YouTube accounts have since been taken down.
The developments in Bibi’s case emerged the same day that Rawalpindi police announced a separate investigation, in which two people were taken into custody for questioning in the death of Hina Javed, 45, whose body was found with her hands bound and a wire around her neck. Police said they are investigating that case, too, as a suspected instance of domestic violence.
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