Malik Azam started working for the Daily Pakistan newspaper’s small Multan bureau in 2010, and his first story for the paper is still one of his favourites. He got a tip about a piece of land owned by the government that was being encroached upon by a minister. When the story ran, an opposition political party jumped on it, and soon the news was being discussed on talk shows and written about in other newspapers. The province’s chief minister took note, and Azam says he soon received a phone call. “They asked me where I’d found the information,” he recalls. “I led them to it, and then, just like that—” he snaps his fingers “—the encroachment was finished. Today there’s a hospital on that land.”
It was everything he loved about journalism. “The stories you see these days,” he says, shaking his head. “Everyone is chasing the government’s soft stories. Even the biggest media groups are just doing PR. I want investigative journalism. The salary doesn’t matter. The resources don’t matter. It’s all about your will. How strong is your will? How far can you reach?” The best stories reassure him that “at least I have done something.”
“The best stories uncover truths, no matter how cleverly hidden,” he feels. You may have have read Malik Azam’s “best story,” even if you don’t know his name or read the Daily Pakistan. It was the story of a girl from a small village in Punjab who changed her name and hid her identity and became one of the most scandalous women in Pakistan.
There are only a handful of men in the Daily Pakistan’s Multan office on the day I visit to meet Azam. He speaks softly and starts our conversation with “Bismillah” (In the name of Allah). His hair is greying at the sideburns, and he has a bushy handlebar moustache. His forehead is lined, and when he ponders the answer to a particularly tricky question, he often furrows his brow, the lines deepen and his eyes look sadder than they usually do. Every day he spends more than an hour commuting to and from work. He is running late on the day we meet, but even so, when he arrives he looks freshly shaved, is wearing a perfectly ironed shalwar kameez and apologizes profusely. He is not in the habit of being late. He insists on offering me lunch to make up for it, but then, slightly shyly, wonders out loud what a woman from Karachi would want to eat in Multan. Perhaps pizza, like his daughter enjoys?
The Daily Pakistan newsroom is a bare-bones space, a bit rundown and dark. There are no windows, and stacks of old newspapers are heaped in corners and under tables. A young boy scuttles between the desks with a steel tray crammed with hot cups of tea. Someone plays a recording of Quranic verses on their computer and turns the volume up until the room is filled with the recitation. “Which of your Lord’s favours will you deny?” the verse asks. The men will shortly lay reed mats on the small balcony outside the office, next to the stairwell, and gather for prayers.
When the bureau chief arrives, the crisp swish of his starched white shalwar kameez announcing him, the reporters push their chairs back with their legs, some shuffle their feet back into their sandals or slippers, and then, not quite standing and not quite sitting, they remain in a half-crouch over their desks, each sinking back down the minute the chief passes him.
Azam’s beat at the newspaper “keeps shifting.” He does whatever stories are assigned to him or whatever he happens to come across. One day he met two friends who said they had a particularly interesting piece of information for him.
“Yaar,” said one, pointing to the other. “Ask him about Fouzi.”
“Fouzi? Who is Fouzi?” Azam asked.
His friend laughed. “Let’s go for a meal in the evening. I’ll tell you everything. It’s quite an interesting chapter.” However, when they sat down to dinner that night, the man hemmed and hawed and delayed. He made a big deal about ordering the food and further small talk, teasing the reporter.
Azam finally demanded, “Are you going to tell me or not?”
The friend leaned back, satisfied. “Fouzi,” he said, “is Qandeel Baloch.”
That’s it? That was the big news? Azam had heard the woman’s name but didn’t know much about her.
“She was my classmate,” his friend continued. They had lived close to each other in the village she was from—yes, the village. She was no city girl. They had studied in school together until the ninth grade.
“So everyone in the village knows who this woman is?” Azam asked.
They did indeed, his friend said. There were others like him, people who had gone to school with Qandeel or who knew her family. And, in fact, Azam’s friend’s wife had been at a school in Multan with Qandeel as well.
Azam went to the Daily Pakistan entertainment reporter and told him about Fouzi. The reporter scoffed. So what? he said. Big deal. Most of these women have fake names and identities.
For six months, no matter how often Qandeel featured in the news, Azam sat on the story. There was no point filing it, he insists. As he puts it, the story would not “pinch” in Multan—there wouldn’t be much interest. No one in Multan would have cared what some girl from a nearby village was doing in Islamabad, Lahore or Karachi. He concedes that perhaps people might have been interested when Qandeel started making videos for Imran Khan, but he just didn’t bother with the story at that point.
It’s an explanation that many reporters in Multan are quick to sympathize with.
“Even I knew where she was from,” claims J, a reporter for a TV channel. “A guy who lived in Shah Sadar Din called me up and told me, This Qandeel Baloch is a girl from our area. I didn’t run with the story. I took it easy. But two days later Azam ran it in the Daily Pakistan and then suddenly every paper and channel had it.”
J isn’t the only one who says he knew Qandeel’s true identity. Many reporters in Multan mutter that friends or sources from villages outside Multan or in Dera Ghazi Khan gave them the information, but Azam was the first one to print it. J then got in on the act by revealing that Qandeel had stayed in a women’s shelter when she fled Shah Sadar Din.
Azam and his bureau chief, Shaukat Iqbal, rubbish rivals’ claims. “If they had broken the news, they wouldn’t be saying any of this,” sneers Iqbal. “They didn’t get the scoop and they definitely would have faced the consequences for that. Ask them just how many angry messages they got. How many colleagues asked them why they didn’t get the news?”
When Azam saw the videos of the meeting between Qandeel and Mufti Qavi, he went to the paper’s chief reporter. “The bachi [girl] is from our area,” he told him, pointing to the TV where a clip of Qandeel taking a selfie with the cleric was running. “And by the way, she’s not even Baloch.”
“How do you know?” the reporter asked.
They went to see the bureau chief together.
“File it,” Iqbal ordered.
The story ran on 23 June, tucked away in a small box on the back page of the newspaper’s Multan edition. “From Shah Sadar Din’s Fouzia Azeem to Qandeel Baloch, a bitter journey to the heights of fame,” the headline read. “Her father’s name is Muhammad Azeem, from a Ma’arah family…” She had been unlucky in love in 2003 or 2004, and that had been her turning point, Azam wrote. He revealed that Qandeel had worked as a bus hostess and after entering the world of modelling had transformed herself from Fouzia to Qandeel Baloch. While he won’t reveal how he found out she had worked at Faisal Movers, Azam admits that he was never able to find proof that she had been a hostess—there was no employee record or even a single co-worker who remembered her from that time.
By this point Azam had seen her passport—he won’t say how—and learned that Qandeel had travelled to South Africa in 2007. “Her selfies with Mufti Abdul Qavi of Multan have become the hot cake [sic] in the media,” the story noted. An old photograph of Qandeel, her chin resting on her hands, ran with the piece. The next day the Daily Pakistan’s back page featured an image of Qandeel’s passport, including her real name, her date of birth and identity card number. “She went back to her father’s home three times after she left, but never helped her parents leave the godforsaken village where she first opened her eyes in March 1990 in a mud house,” the story noted. “The family cannot tolerate to see her face again.” On both days the stories ran under a box containing an interview with “Multan’s famous religious scholar, Mufti Qavi.” “We met on Qandeel’s wishes, she was scared some magic had been done on her,” Mufti Qavi said in the interview. “Qandeel Baloch has apologized to me five times, and I have forgiven her.”
The stories, which included a high-resolution scan of Qandeel’s passport, were immediately run on the paper’s English-language website, and quickly went viral. “Controversy queen Qandeel Baloch has been headlining the news for the past couple of days for her scandalous statements on live television and secretive hotel room meetings with religious scholars,” the report stated. “Although she now lives a somewhat glamorous life, new details revealed about her past show that she may have once lived an ordinary life of hardship and unrequited love.” Clippings of Azam’s Urdu story were shared on Facebook and Twitter.
“When Mufti Qavi came into the picture, it became a hot issue,” Azam explains. “If I had run the story about her real name back in January, the impact would not have been as much.” It was a tantalizing mixture—a religious scholar who loved the limelight, and a woman who had filmed herself alone with him in his hotel room. Mufti Qavi was well known among the media in Multan, and more importantly his family had been running a madrassa in the city for decades. His sisters held classes teaching women from some of Multan’s most respected families how to read and interpret the Quran. The information Azam had on Qandeel would finally “pinch.”
The Daily Pakistan story was picked up by other Urdu newspapers and the English-language dailies. It ran on television. Once everyone knew the name of the village Qandeel was from—it was not hard for local correspondents to call up sources in Dera Ghazi Khan or Shah Sadar Din, a little over two hours from Multan—the media wanted to know all it could about the daughter of Muhammad Azeem.
Ever since the age of ten, Adil Nizami had known exactly what he wanted to do. That year, in July 2001, his eyes had been glued to the TV screen as news broke that the minister of state for foreign affairs had been shot dead in a town in the district of Multan while campaigning in a local election. He was riveted by the coverage.
While at university, Adil dabbled in print journalism, but applied for a job at a small television channel as soon as he graduated. His second job had been with a flashy new network that soon went under for fraud and embezzlement. He finally arrived at 24 News, a current affairs channel, in 2015. At the time 24 had only been around for a year, but it had big ambitions and had recently snapped up one of the country’s best-known political talkshow hosts. Adil went for an interview and waited with nine others. He knew his CV wasn’t too impressive, but he had something none of the other candidates seemed to have: an interest in current affairs bordering on obsession. “People ask me, ‘Have you seen Devdas? Have you seen Taare Zameen Par?’ No, I haven’t. I watch the news. That’s all I want to watch. My friends call me crazy. But this isn’t a passing interest.”
“Let’s say I am a cleric who wants to be a member of the senate,” his interviewer said after briefly glancing at Adil’s sparse CV. “How would I go about that?”
Adil rattled off the procedure.
“OK,” said the interviewer, surprised. “Not bad. How many four-star generals are there in the army?”
“Sir, there are two four-star generals in the army at a time: one is the joint chief of staff and one is the chief of army staff.”
“Tell me this,” the interviewer said, leaning across the table. “Who is the Sri Lankan president?”
“Well,” Adil replied, “five days ago there was a transition of power. So do you want the last guy’s name or the current president’s?”
He was offered the job immediately.
On his second day at work a building collapsed in Multan, crushing everyone inside. One man died at the scene while Adil was reporting. He couldn’t sleep that night. The next day he arrived at work with puffy eyes. He was quiet, withdrawn. “Sir, this is what we’re going to be doing every day,” his cameraman said. “If this is how you’re going to be, you can’t be a reporter. You might as well stay at home.” A few months later, Adil found himself in front of a blazing house, reporting live as rescue workers struggled to control the fire. A woman and her five children were laid out on the street, still as dolls. He was relieved that he didn’t feel a thing. He quickly learned how to tell stories about things that people hoped would never happen to them.
On the morning of July 16, he received a phone call from a source at 10:12 a.m. He remembers the time because he was running a late for work that day, literally racing up the stairs to the newsroom when his mobile rang. The man on the other line cut through the niceties. “I’m at the police station in Shah Sadar Din,” he said. “It’s Qandeel. She’s been murdered.”
Adil flicked through the channels on the television screens in the newsroom: the usual advertisements, the daily bulletins, morning shows. He walked over to his assignment editor. “Heard anything about Qandeel this morning?” he asked. There was nothing. Adil called the source back. “You’re wrong, my friend. Must be a mix-up.”
Twenty minutes later his phone rang again. It was the same source. “It’s confirmed,” he said. “Trust me, it’s her. The police are heading out.” At that moment all other beats ceased to matter. According to the rules of the newsroom, Adil should have told the crime reporter about the tip. But even though Adil had been with 24 News for barely over a year at this time, the channel had covered Qandeel enough times for him to know that she was one of Pakistan’s most controversial celebrities. He was determined to be the one to break this news. Telling no one but his editor about the phone call, he jumped into the station’s van with his cameraman and shouted at the driver to take the fastest route to the Muzaffarabad police station, a twenty-five-minute drive away from Multan’s city centre, from where his source had called.
The first time Adil had seen her was at work was when one of the video editors had pulled him aside and showed him a video she had posted on her Facebook page. This was in March 2016, right before a cricket match between Pakistan and India, one of the world’s biggest sports rivalries. In the video Qandeel was lying on a mound of pillows, wearing a sleeveless Barbie-pink dress with black polka dots.1 The creamy tops of her breasts peeked out over the neckline. A black tattoo—a leaping deer? a dagger?—snaked across her right breast. She had a message for Shahid Afridi, the captain of the Pakistan cricket team. “Just win this match,” she said, staring straight at the camera. “And then see how Qandeel does a strip dance for you. Seriously. I’ll say your name as I strip.”
Adil couldn’t peel his eyes off the screen. He had never heard a woman speak this way. How could she say those things?
The next encounter was far tamer. Not long after the video was posted, someone at the office got her number and Adil was nominated to dial her up on speaker before a group of fellow reporters. He introduced himself and then put the call on speaker. The men hovered in a circle around the phone. She was friendly, Adil found out, especially with the media. Then he was nudged to pass her to someone else. “Qandeel, our assignment editor wants to talk to you,” Adil told her. The editor lost his nerve. He couldn’t say a word. Qandeel waited patiently on the line, hearing the reporters’ stifled giggles. The editor panicked and cut the call. To this day, he is still needled about that incident.
Racing to Qandeel’s home on the day he found out she had been killed, Adil marveled at his luck. A giggle escaped his mouth. The van’s driver raised his eyebrows. Adil ignored him. Well, he wasn’t about to let slip the biggest story in Multan in years—maybe even the biggest story in Pakistan right now—by telling a loudmouth driver with at least six friends on speed dial working for other television channels. Sixty or seventy crime reporters in Multan, and none of them had got the call, Adil mused. This fat little bird flew right into his hands. Just like that. And no one else knew!
The driver glanced over at Adil in the passenger seat. The baby-faced reporter’s nose was dotted with beads of sweat, and one leg had had the shakes ever since they’d left the office. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” Adil muttered under his breath as the van crept closer to the checkpoint on Shershah Road in the army cantonment in Multan. His fingers drummed a frantic beat on his laminated press card. Where does this kid need to rush off to so early in the morning on a Saturday? the driver wondered. He knew Adil’s beat was the political and religious parties. Had some bloody maulana (cleric) died or what? He stuck his head out of the van’s window and cursed everything: the beggars slowly weaving their way through the lines of cars when the lights changed from amber to green; the men perched on laden carts urging donkeys that were too tired or starved to do more than strain against their harness as they tried to inch their load forward; the motorbike riders who could wriggle on to the pavement and zoom ahead; the van’s broken air conditioning; the goddamn heat; this mystery assignment.
The Muzaffarabad area on the outskirts of the city was mainly known for having one of the largest textile mills in the country, and they had long since driven past the fork in the road that led to it. The police station where Adil’s source had called him from was located on a deserted stretch of road with no street signs or markers. It was quiet there, with only a few scattered shops selling mobile phone credit, drinks or snacks. There were no pedestrians. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the policeman behind the desk inside the station. Adil pressed him. “I said I have no idea,” he snapped. “No police van has headed out from here.”
On his way out, Adil felt someone pinch his elbow. A policeman jerked his head towards a corner. Adil followed him. “Get out of here, drive back towards the cantonment and then take the first lane on the left when you see a sign for a clinic,” the policeman whispered. “Go to Karachi Hotel. She lives there.” He paused. “Lived.”
“Karachi Hotel?” repeated the driver.
“That’s what he said.” Adil shrugged. Small restaurants and roadside cafés serving tea and snacks were commonly referred to as hotels. “Must be a restaurant.”
Adil got a call from his editor. “There’s a Shinza Baloch who lives near the police station Adil,” he said. “Some singer or actor? Do you think it could be her?”
Please, dear God, don’t tell me it’s some actress no one has heard of! Adil thought.
They drove through a warren of unpaved narrow lanes that led off the main road. The van had trouble squeezing through. Adil walked to a small kiosk covered in advertisements for mobile phone companies.
“I’m looking for a restaurant,” he told the shopkeeper. “Karachi Hotel?”
“You’re in Karachi Hotel, bhai,” the man replied. “This neighbourhood. This is Karachi Hotel.” He looked at Adil’s press card dangling around his neck. “A police car just went that way,” he said, pointing to a lane.
They drove into the lane. Nothing. Another one. Nothing again. Adil frantically called his sources in the police. One whispered directions to the house, another said that they already knew who had done it. They knew who had killed her. Adil didn’t know what was true. He just needed to get to the house fast. The news would spread quickly, and it would not be long before other reporters got wind of it. Then he saw the ambulance. Adil scurried towards it while the cameraman rigged up his equipment. He could hear crying. The ambulance was parked outside a clinic for children. The lane seemed to be a dead end, closed off by a brick wall.
“What happened, son?” Adil asked a little boy standing near the ambulance.
“Uncle-ji dropped dead in Karachi,” the child replied. “They brought the body back this morning. He came in an aeroplane, you know.”
Uncle-ji?
“Who are you looking for?” asked a woman standing at the gate to a house next to the clinic.
“Do you know where Qandeel Baloch lives?” Adil asked.
“Who?”
“Qandeel.”
“No one here by that name. I’ve lived here for eight years. There’s us, the widow of a police officer and a lame old man. He has a wife and son. No daughter.”
There was a flash of black and khaki in the corner of Adil’s eye. He turned. The lane wasn’t a dead end after all. There, to the right, were three small houses nestled in a corner. A pale yellow one-storey house abutted a rose-pink wall. A policeman darted behind the house’s cream-coloured front door. The woman glanced at it. “That’s the lame man’s home. The police just showed up ten minutes ago. God only knows why.”
Jackpot! Adil thought.
Adil walked over, cupped his hands around his eyes and peered between the bars of a window next to the front door of the house. He couldn’t see a thing. A gate next to the door swung open with the gentlest of nudges. An elderly man and woman sat in a room to his right. Straight ahead, the door to another room opened. Four or five men, some police, stood in a circle around a charpoy, their heads bowed, their necks craned forward. What were they looking at? A pink and white sheet trailed on to the floor. Something peeked out at the end. Was that a foot?
The mustachioed face of a policeman was the last thing Adil saw in that house. “Out!” the officer hissed. “Move back.” The gate was slammed behind Adil as he stumbled down a potholed concrete ramp. His phone rang. It was the channel. “We ready to go? I need you to do a live call immediately. We can do the visuals later,” his editor barked. Adil stayed on the line and waited. A few seconds before the anchor came on, he heard the producer say urgently, “OK, ready. Wait. Is it her? You’re sure it’s her?”
At 11:25 a.m. that day Adil Nizami, a twenty-five-year-old rookie reporter from Multan, broke the biggest story of his career. “Famous model Qandeel Baloch has been killed,” he blurted out in a live call that interrupted 24 News’s regular morning bulletin.2
As he stood in the lane outside Qandeel’s house, the words that had been on the tip of his tongue for more than an hour now rushed out. “Some are saying that she was shot dead. The police have just reached her house here in Multan. We should find out shortly how she was murdered. The incident took place a little while ago in the area of Muzaffarabad, where model Qandeel Baloch had been living for some time. Her brothers, the murderers, were angry with her because of her behaviour and all the scandals on TV. We also found out that she was planning to travel to India to take part in a reality TV show there. Her family was angry with her. And we have found out this morning that her brothers have either strangled her or shot her, but there’s conflicting information about how they killed her.”
In the van the driver received a call. He listened for a moment. “Fuck. Are you sure? Adil said so? Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell you how to get here.” It’s going to be a long day, he thought, irritated.
A long day in the middle of nowhere in this heat.
After forty minutes, a line of twelve Digital Satellite News Gathering (DSNG) vans made its way down the lane leading to the house. Adil estimated that more than a hundred people—police, reporters, cameramen, locals—were now buzzing around like flies in a jar on the rough sandy road.
When the ambulance arrived, it took the driver half an hour to cover the last few feet. No one wanted to give up their hard-won spot in front of the small house. It didn’t matter. Nothing could save her now, and the police did not seem to be in any rush to get the body out, even as the mercury rose on that sweltering July day. Adil’s bright pink knock-off Ralph Lauren shirt was covered in dark patches of sweat. It was nearing 2 p.m. The officers milling around outside the house looked bewildered. Some hadn’t even had the time to put their uniforms on before they rushed to the scene. Every time a high-ranking officer arrived, someone inside the house would open the gate just a few inches for them to squeeze through.
The reporters had been breathlessly relaying each drop of information as they received it from inside the house. They were getting restless. Their producers mined Qandeel’s social media feeds for quotes and photographs to tide viewers over until they had anything tangible. Adil watched his colleague hoist his camera above the gate of the house, attempting to film what was transpiring inside. It could make for a precious few minutes of footage that the channel would slap its logo on, running it on a loop until Adil could give them something better. A policeman swatted at the camera. An officer had made a video of the body inside the room. The reporters scrambled for it.
Adil didn’t want that. I want the real thing, he thought. If I’d only been here ten minutes before…If I’d headed out right when I got that first call, I could have been here before the police. I could have got a shot of her.
He knew exactly what he would have done. Shoot footage of the body first. Blur the face of course, but then again that depended on what the bosses at the channel wanted. Maybe a good shot of her face, in case they wanted to run a still. “After that, I’d shift focus,” Adil told me. “She’s been murdered, she’s been identified, she’s Qandeel Baloch. OK! Done! Now the parents. How was she murdered? Who murdered her? The story they gave the police—that story could have been mine. I would have been the first to get it.”
All eyes were on the ambulance, which had now been wedged up against the gate. “They’ll bring her out soon,” the reporters murmured among themselves. “Any minute now,” they told their producers reassuringly. “The body will come out any minute now.” Adil had the best spot, right next to the ambulance’s open doors. The other reporters had graciously offered him the space. “You were the first one here,” they said, squeezing his shoulders. Adil spotted a photographer he knew from another channel. He called him over. He could hear someone behind the gate shouting for a sheet. It was time. Adil had a plan.
The gate of the house opened. Everyone surged forward. Adil helped the photographer up into the ambulance and told him to crouch at the far end. The ambulance men had forgotten to bring the standard white shroud for the body; they had used the pink bed sheet from Qandeel’s charpoy instead. The body was loaded into the back of the vehicle. Inside, the photographer plucked the sheet off so he could quickly take photos of the body. I need to see for myself, Adil thought as he quickly slid open one of the ambulance windows. His hand, holding his mobile phone, snaked inside. He stared at the puffy blue-lipped face for a split second. He began filming.3
“Yaar, dead body ka khyaal karein [Have some respect for the dead],” City Police Officer (CPO) Azhar Akram, the highest-ranking official on the spot said as he grabbed Adil by the arm and pulled him away from the ambulance. “What do you think you’re doing?”
But Adil had got his shot.
The ambulance pulled away. The door to the house opened and two police officials came out with an old man. He could not stand on his own as he had only one leg. The policemen held the elderly man up as the reporters scrambled towards him and pushed their microphones under his chin. With his arm around the shoulders of one of the officers at his side, Qandeel’s father, Muhammad Azeem, confirmed the news of his daughter Qandeel Baloch’s death. He compared her to Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan who was assassinated in 2007. His daughter had been as brave as Benazir, Azeem wanted the reporters to know. The loosely tied white cotton turban he was wearing unravelled as he told the media that his son Waseem had killed Qandeel.
Azeem was immediately taken to the police station just a short walk from his home, where he filed a First Information Report (FIR). Azeem formally accused his youngest son of murdering his daughter. “My daughter, Qandeel Baloch, who works in showbiz, came to our house in Multan from Karachi on Eid…my son, Waseem, who is twenty-four or twenty-five years old, came to meet us on the 14th of July,” he stated for the record. He implicated another of his sons, Aslam, a junior officer in the army, in the crime, saying that he had encouraged Waseem to kill Qandeel. “[Waseem] wanted to stop Qandeel from working in showbiz.” “Qandeel Baloch was killed by Waseem in the name of honour,” Azeem wrote in the FIR. “This is an injustice. He did this for money. Waseem killed Qandeel Baloch at the urging of my other son, Aslam Shaheen, a subedar [captain] in the army.”
Over the coming months, Adil would lose count of the number of times his jerky footage of Qandeel’s body in the ambulance would be seen by viewers around the world. Even when his phone crashed and he lost the original video, he could pull it up from thousands of sites where it continued to be shared.
When I interviewed Adil four months later, I asked him what he had been thinking on that day as he filmed Qandeel’s body. He thought for a moment. “What was I doing?” he repeated the question to himself. “In that kind of moment—when you don’t have control of your senses, can’t control what you will do, what you must do and what you shouldn’t do—you don’t think about this question until later. Then you ask yourself, what could I have done differently?”
Some twenty years ago, or perhaps longer than that, two questions were asked on a TV game show. “Which bank in all of Pakistan has the richest coffers?” “Where do the richest people in the land live?” The answer to both was Shah Sadar Din. At least, that’s how people in this village4 of a little over forty-five thousand tell the story.
“People here might not have education, but they have money streaming in from abroad,” explains Javed Siddiqui, a reporter in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan. The people of the district, also named Dera Ghazi Khan, where Shah Sadar Din is located, brag that the area has the most expensive land in the country—yes, more than Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad. Since the 1970s, men from Shah Sadar Din have been travelling to Saudi Arabia for work, Siddiqui says. According to the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment, more than two hundred and thirty thousand residents of Dera Ghazi Khan district are recorded as having left the country in search of employment between 1981 and 2017.5 Some find jobs in construction while others set up small businesses. It is unusual to find even one home in the district that has not sent a father, son, brother or husband abroad. Qandeel’s brother Arif was one of many who set their sights on a life in Saudi Arabia.
According to urban legend, families in the village made fortunes working outside Pakistan. “Labourers were sending home up to a lakh every month,” Siddiqui insists. “Some might send five, ten, twenty lakhs. Places here that deal with foreign remittances brag that they have dealt with transfers of twenty million rupees in a month.” He says that three servants who worked in his home have left for Saudi Arabia. One of them, a labourer, sends 3,000 Saudi riyals to his family every month. “Yes!” exclaims Siddiqui. “A labourer! He earns more than 80,000 rupees.”
It’s December 2016. I’m sitting with Siddiqui and a few other local reporters in his small office in Dera Ghazi Khan city, an hour away from Shah Sadar Din. “How much do you think this office is worth?” Siddiqui asks, referring to the 800-square-foot space where he is sitting on a carpeted floor, sipping tea and juice with other journalists. “Thirty million rupees,” he brags.
One of the men pipes up with a story he heard recently. A man from Shah Sadar Din went to a small tea shop—Where? Oh he can’t remember where, and that’s not the point anyway—and asked for a cup of chai. Ten minutes later he was still waiting. He asked again. An hour went by, and there was still no tea. “Just see what I do to you,” he shouted at the server. He bought the tea shop and the land it was built on the very next day and fired the man who hadn’t given him a cup of tea.
The others titter and nod knowingly. They have no doubt that this really happened.
Statistics point to an altogether different reality. In 1997 the Asian Development Bank reported that the district of Dera Ghazi Khan is “the least developed division of Pakistan, with more than 50 percent of the population below the poverty line.”6 Even sixteen years later, life was not much better for most of the people of Dera Ghazi Khan—the district was one of eleven in Punjab where a quarter of Pakistan’s poor reside.7
There’s another story about Shah Sadar Din that many of the men I meet in Dera Ghazi Khan are proud of. In March 2009 the Sri Lankan cricket team was visiting Lahore for a match when it came under attack. The bus transporting the players was hit with hand grenades and fired on. Seven people, including six policemen, were killed that day. And, the story goes, two of the attackers were boys from Shah Sadar Din. The following month the New York Times reported that Taliban insurgents “are teaming up with local militant groups to make inroads in Punjab” and warned that the “dusty, impoverished fringes of Punjab could be the next areas facing…insurgency” in Pakistan. Quoting a senior police official, the story noted that “militants have gained strength considerably in the district of Dera Ghazi Khan.”8
Religious fervour here is a particularly violent strain. “It has nothing to do with Islam,” feels the Daily Pakistan’s bureau chief, Shaukat Iqbal. “It’s just the society there. People might not even know how to read the kalma [declaration of faith], but they’ll say they are Muslim.” He’s scornful of the locals. “Ask them their age and they’ll say, ‘I’ve bathed forty times in my life, so I am forty years old.’ In this day and age.”
“This is a criminal kind of area,” Siddiqui says. The locals say landlords and tribal chiefs hold sway in the villages and towns in the district, and they maintain their influence by making sure no one bands together against them. Petty feuds quickly spiral out of control, often goaded on by the landlords. And when it comes to women, they warn, even a whiff of disrespect can get you killed. In February 2017 it was reported that at least one woman is killed and five others tortured over domestic disputes every day in south Punjab.9 Siddiqui tells me about a woman who had been murdered by her husband just the other day. He only remembers this incident because he found it odd that the man didn’t shoot the woman, as is the norm here, but strangled her. The others chime in with their tales: a man who killed his mother and two sisters but who can be found in his home village this very minute because he never went to jail; a woman whose legs were cut off because—well, they’re not actually sure why; a girl who was found with a boy a few days ago and the boy was immediately packed off to Saudi Arabia, while the girl…no one tells me what the girl’s father did to her when he found out.
It’s not just women who are at risk. Three days after Qandeel was murdered, a man died after five men chopped off his arms, lips and nose. The attackers ran off with the man’s severed limbs, leaving him to bleed to death by the side of the road. He had been having an affair with a married woman who lived in Paiga village in Dera Ghazi Khan district.10 In February 2017 the nose and lips of a twenty-two-year-old man were cut off after he eloped with a girl. Members of the girl’s tribe accused the man of kidnapping her. When she was “recovered” and returned to her parents’ home, she was declared kari—black, a woman who has lost her honour—and sold. In most cases, a woman who is found with a man to whom she is not married is murdered right away. Alternatively, the couple is brought before a jirga, or council of elders, and—following the custom in many villages in Dera Ghazi Khan district—the man has to pay a penalty and the woman is either killed or sold for the same amount as the penalty.
“It might be a big deal for you, but for us these are small things,” says one reporter who doesn’t want to give his name. “If we started highlighting all these cases, then the entire media industry of Pakistan might as well come and set up shop in the district. It’s not that we don’t respect women,” the reporter wants me to know. For instance, he points out, women are held in such esteem that if there is a clash between members of two tribes and three or four women from one tribe visit the home of the opposing tribe’s chief, they can ask for forgiveness or a truce and return to their homes without a scratch or a hand laid on them. “That is how highly we regard our women,” he says.
If they want to go to school or college, they are given permission to do so. At the City School in Dera Ghazi Khan—a branch of a well-known expensive private school based in Lahore—many of the female students are the first in their family to be educated. Women who wish to work can get jobs in their village or the district as teachers. “But the way that Qandeel was, we just cannot accept a woman like that,” the reporter says. “What she was doing was wrong. And if you’re doing something wrong in your own home, but you keep that within those four walls, that’s all right. But she was doing things—dancing, singing—for everyone to see. Our religion doesn’t allow this, our culture doesn’t allow this, our area and our traditions do not allow this.”
Since July 2016 the people of Shah Sadar Din have had to explain their culture and traditions to the outsiders who streamed in when news broke of Qandeel’s murder. “There have been so many murders here since then,” the reporter says. “But Qandeel was a bit famous, a bit well known, so maybe that’s why it got highlighted.”
The locals find the attention distasteful. If they were initially curious about the media, they now find its presence disrespectful. “Qandeel’s relatives say that her father should not continue to meet these journalists,” the reporter claims. “People in the village say that they are being given a bad name with all this media coverage.” They have started to refuse to give interviews, and Safdar Shah says that some have warned him not to bring any more reporters or camera crews to the village. It has become difficult for outsiders to meet or interview Qandeel’s relatives or friends of the family, who don’t want word to get out that they have been giving information to the media, particularly as the court case against Qandeel’s brother and her cousin Haq Nawaz continues.
The answer to the question of whether people in Shah Sadar Din knew about Qandeel before Malik Azam ran a story revealing her identity changes depending on who you talk to. “We all know each other here,” says Hussain, a man who lives a few steps from the mosque around the corner from Qandeel’s home in the village. “We knew who she was. We knew that Qandeel Baloch is Fouzia Azeem. It’s you who found out later.”
He claims that many people in the village liked to watch Qandeel on television when she appeared on talk shows or interviews or sang and danced. Siddiqui says he knows of people who liked Qandeel’s Facebook page, even though none of them would admit to it today. “Her brother’s friends used to watch her videos,” he says. “They wanted her.” Hussain explains that as long as it was only people in the village who knew who she was, there was no problem. The moment the rest of the country found out, they felt disgraced.
Few mention Mufti Abdul Qavi. He might visit from time to time and have a family connection to the village, but most of the people here do not seem to revere him. In some conversations the mention of his name elicits titters. “That horny cleric,” one man calls him. “Not many people here know Mufti Qavi,” Hussain claims. When the selfies and video from Qandeel’s encounter with Mufti Qavi went viral, there was chatter in the village about the cleric’s roots in Shah Sadar Din. A few days later, when Malik Azam’s story revealed that Qandeel was from the same village, hundreds of thousands of people across the country suddenly knew the name Shah Sadar Din, and it wasn’t because of the riches in the banks or the expensive land or anything else the villagers are proud of.
But there are also those who say they only found out that Qandeel was one of their own when the Daily Pakistan story came out. Five days after Azam’s scoop was published, Fayyaz Khan Leghari, the vice chairman of the union council in the neighbouring town of Gadai, sued Qandeel for 50 million rupees in damages for adopting Baloch as her surname. He wanted to threaten her with a greater penalty, but fifty million was the maximum amount he could claim in such a case. He says that the tribe that Qandeel belongs to—the Ma’arah—are not Baloch, and their attempts to claim otherwise are lies.
“I just wanted her to tell the truth and to be honest,” says Leghari, a short, mild-mannered Baloch man in his forties. “Baloch people all over the world contacted me—they even offered monetary help if I needed it—because they were so worried about what people would think of them if they believed Qandeel was also Baloch.”
A friend sent him the link to a video Qandeel uploaded on to her Facebook page. Leghari watched her kneeling on her bed, wearing a traditional black and pale-yellow Baloch woman’s embroidered shirt. She had veiled her face with a dupatta. She called herself Balochi Laila and dedicated the song to her “Indian lovers and fans.” She wore an ornate silver headpiece which twinkled and chimed as she shook her hips, raised her arms and thrust out her chest. She played with her veil before finally taking it off.11
“That was totally against our Baloch traditions,” Leghari says. “Baloch people are honourable and our women cover themselves. They do purdah [veil themselves] and she is showing off her naked body and saying she is Baloch. If someone is not Baloch and they—with their behaviour and their actions—defame us and ruin our name, I take offence at that.” Giving notice of the case to Qandeel, he warned her that her bid to achieve fame and “cheap publicity” was hurting the sentiments of the Baloch people. They were supposedly extremely dejected by her behaviour.
Ultimately, whether they claim they knew Qandeel’s identity all along and or say they were unaware of it, the locals took action. The easiest thing to do was to turn their sights on her family, especially her younger brother. Waseem used to run a small mobile phone shop in the village marketplace, funded by Qandeel. While Hussain claims that Qandeel would sometimes visit the village late at night, arriving and leaving before any of her friends or extended family could find out, others say that she would ask her driver to stop at the edge of town and wait for Waseem so she could hand him wads of cash. When she sent money to her parents, he would allegedly pester them for a handout.
The mobile phone shop, just big enough for three or four men to stand in at a time, is nestled inside the village’s main marketplace. It has a clear glass exterior and the latest mobile phones are displayed on glass shelves. Waseem soon sold it off. It was the second business he had run into the ground since Qandeel started giving him money. He liked to drink and lounge at the local dhaba with his friends, sucking on the gurgling pipe of a hookah or smoking hashish-laced cigarettes. He was known as a “loafer type” and a man of short temper. “He kept bad company,” Hussain says dismissively. “All their evenings would be spent outside the home.”
Waseem’s parents say that after the Daily Pakistan story revealing Qandeel’s real name, their son was taunted. “You have no shame,” he would be told by friends and strangers. “You are worth nothing.” Hussain remembers someone jeering at Waseem, “Your sister is singing and dancing in her knickers and you’re living a luxurious life with the money she earns.”
“They would say, ‘You have no honour. Your sister dances naked,’ ” says Hussain. People would go to Waseem and ask if he could download his sister’s latest clip on to their phones. Hussain quickly clarifies, “I have never seen them. I’ve never seen any of her videos.”
Soon people from Shah Sadar Din who worked with Qandeel’s brother in Saudi Arabia were mocking him, Hussain claims. “They told him that his sister was bringing dishonour to their village. They would have thought it was necessary to do something about this. They would have thought about killing her.”
The day Qandeel was murdered, a reporter who did not wish to give me his name was on his way home from a neighbouring district. He stopped to have some tea with friends, five of whom were from Dera Ghazi Khan; one was a visitor. “The minute I heard what had happened, I said, ‘This is great news,’ ” the reporter confesses. The five men from Dera Ghazi Khan agreed, but the visitor was appalled.
“How can you say this?” he asked. “A woman has been murdered.”
“Go ask anyone in our area,” the reporter explained. “They will all say the same thing. You can think it’s illiterate or savage. But if I travel anywhere in Pakistan and I’m asked where I’m from, if I say Shah Sadar Din, then the immediate answer will be, ‘Oh! Isn’t Qandeel Baloch from your area?’ At least we don’t have that to worry about any more.”
When I ask if it matters that the murder goes against the laws of Pakistan, the reporter looks slightly puzzled. “The law can be broken, but we can never break the rules of our culture,” he explains. “To break the law is nothing at all. These laws can be written and rewritten. But the rules of our culture have been around for centuries. To break them is very, very difficult.” At the end of the day Qandeel brought her fate upon herself, he feels. “Islam tells us to hide our sins,” he says. “So why did she highlight all of hers?” Then he sighs. “But may her sins be forgiven. After all, she was human too.”
The others in the room nod and murmur, “May Allah forgive her.”
On the morning of 16 July 2016, Attiya Jaffrey, a police investigator, was at home when her husband called out from his usual spot in front of the television—he was obsessive about watching the news and staying up to date. “Qandeel has been killed,” he told her breathlessly.
Just a few weeks ago her husband had told Attiya about this woman and her meeting with a cleric from Multan. Didn’t Qandeel live in Karachi? was Attiya’s immediate thought. This would mean the murder was outside her jurisdiction. Then her heart sank when she heard the anchor say the body had been found in a house in Multan. What was this woman doing here? she remembers thinking. Then Muzaffarabad was mentioned and she sighed with relief. This neighbourhood was nowhere near her patch. She watched the breaking news play over and over again, saw the media frenzy as reporters jostled for space outside a small house at the end of a lane. “Thank God it’s in Muzaffarabad,” she said to her husband. “This case is going to get very crazy.”
And then her phone rang. It was her superior, City Police Officer Azhar Akram. He wanted her to come to Qandeel’s house. He was already there with a few other officers and they needed a female officer to accompany the body to the morgue. He wanted a woman he could trust with the job.
It was no secret that Akram thought highly of Attiya. He would praise her in front of other investigating officers and cite her work as an example of efficiency and professionalism. Even though she was a woman, she was so good at what she did, he would say to some of Attiya’s colleagues. Attiya tried not to worry that Akram’s request that day could mean he wanted her on the case. She reminded herself that it was routine for additional officers to be called to the scene of a crime if it was a high-profile case or if extra bodies were needed to handle a crowd or family members.
By the time Attiya got to Qandeel’s house, the crowd had swelled. It felt like she was in the middle of some festival, not a crime scene. The officers at the entrance opened the gate a crack for her to squeeze through as reporters and cameramen jostled to see past her.
She couldn’t believe this small, grubby house was Qandeel’s. Cigarette ends, ground underfoot, lay on the floor outside Qandeel’s room. Inside, the body was laid out on a charpoy on a red sheet patterned with white snowflakes and crystals, a pillow under the head. The room was a mess: on a table were scattered two mobile phones, a purse, an open packet of hair dye, a bottle of mustard oil, a passport, and a one-way plane ticket. Two suitcases were open on the floor. Clothes and make-up spilled out of them. Attiya could see past a door on the right to a narrow courtyard and a small kitchen, where dirty dishes were stacked at the sink. The room was small—you could walk across it in a few strides, and the charpoy, positioned directly under the fan, took up most of the space.
She looked at the body. The stomach had started to bloat. The green shirt with orange embroidery looked uncomfortably tight. There were small gold earrings in the ears. The face was tinged blue. The swollen lips were a deep plum. There were scratch marks on the face, near the eyes and the nose, the blood dry by the time the body was discovered. A female constable was collecting the cigarette butts from the floor. Tests would reveal traces of Waseem’s DNA on the butts. Did he stand outside his sister’s room and have a smoke before or after she went limp and stopped flailing and kicking her feet against the man who held her down with all his weight? The constable snapped rubber gloves on to her hands. She took Qandeel’s hands in hers and gently swabbed the tips of her fingers and looked under her nails. Had Qandeel clawed blindly at anyone she could reach when her face was covered with the sweat-stained scarf that had been around her brother’s shoulders? This is not, Attiya remembers thinking, the work of a single man. The fan spun slowly above the charpoy.
Qandeel’s mother was crouched by the charpoy so quietly that Attiya only noticed her when she smoothed her daughter’s shirt and covered her chest with a white dupatta with pale flowers on it. She was not crying or wailing. She didn’t like it when anyone tried to touch the body. The police needed to check if Qandeel had been raped.
It was stifling in there in the July heat and there were no windows in the room. “Is this really Qandeel Baloch?” CPO Akram asked nobody in particular.
Over the next few days Attiya couldn’t stop thinking about the body. She felt furious every time she remembered how a reporter had yanked off that red sheet—the ambulance crew, the fools, had arrived without any white ones so officers had used the sheet to cover the body as it was carried out of the home.
Four days later, CPO Akram dismissed the investigating officer handling the case for negligence. There was too much media interest—not just local but international—in this case, and too many people ready to criticize the Multan police for bungling it. There could be no mistakes. The CPO wanted someone he could rely on to handle it. “Madam, just watch,” one of Attiya’s wardens commented. “This case will now be hung around your neck.” She had never dealt with a suspected honour killing case before.
Attiya had joined the police force as a sub-inspector in 1988, when she was thirty-six. She is from Gujrat, and was posted to Sialkot as a city traffic warden. She stayed there for sixteen years, got married and had three sons. In 2008 she was sent to Multan and has been in the city ever since. On the day we meet, four months after she saw Qandeel’s body, she is preparing for another move. She has been promoted, some say because of how well she handled Qandeel’s case, and is waiting to find out where she will be posted next. She has had a few days off and looks relaxed, swapping her official black uniform for a bright floral shalwar kameez. She has only come into the office to hand over all the files and records from the Qandeel case to the next investigating officer.
Attiya’s family has a history of service in the police. Her father and his father before him were police officers, and many cousins have joined the force since. She has three brothers, and it was expected that they too would join the police. However, it was Attiya who went to her father and said she wanted to carry on the family tradition. “It was unheard of at the time for a girl to do something like that, especially in our family,” Attiya explains. Her family is conservative and proudly claim to be Syeds, an honorific title for those who say they are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad’s family. “I only managed to do this because I had such a great friendship with and such great love for my father. He took a stand for me, even when everyone else criticized him and said I should just become a teacher.” When friends and family members warned him that letting a girl join a profession dominated by men would bring shame and dishonour to his family, Attiya’s father would respond, “Respect and honour are in Allah’s hands. If it is her fate to be dishonourable and disrespectful, she will bring my family shame even if she becomes a teacher.”
Attiya’s mother agreed, and when her daughter had completed her studies ignored those who said it was now time to marry her off. Eventually, she said, her daughter would marry someone her parents chose for her. By the time she did, she was forty-two years old, and she was the first to marry someone outside the family. Even when she was married, and later, when she had children, she couldn’t think of quitting the police force. “The thought of just being in the home, cleaning it and sitting there all day and reading magazines—it didn’t make sense to me,” she says.
Attiya and her best friend took the police exams together and passed them. “I was among the first batch of women in Sialkot to join the police force,” she explains. There were only four of them. “There were no senior female officers we could turn to for advice or talk to.” It wasn’t always easy, but Attiya stuck it out and did not complain because she did not want her parents’ critics to say they had been right all along. Attiya and her colleagues had been brought up and educated to be polite, but superior officers would rebuke them if they addressed arrested men and women with the formal “aap,” rather than “tu.” They’ll never fear you and won’t tell you anything, they would sneer. When the women patrolled the market together, people would stare at them in their police uniforms and whisper, “Dirty people.”
“I remember the first time we got our uniforms and walked out of the station, an old man passed by me and stopped in his tracks,” Attiya says. The man shook his head in disgust and pinched his earlobes, a gesture to ward off the evil eye. “Shame, shame,” he cried out. “It’s a sign of the Day of Judgement.”
Inside the station the women had to learn not to be seen talking to male colleagues alone—it was the easiest way to become the subject of a rumour about an affair. “You knew that whoever you were seen standing next to alone, there would be a scandal about the two of you,” Attiya says. Male superiors would not call the women into their offices alone, and if they had something to say to them would often use an intermediary to pass on the message. If Attiya or one of the other women complained about a male officer, they knew that the first thing the man would do was attack their character. “It is the greatest weapon they have against us—to say, ‘She’s not a good woman.’ Then they can just sit back and watch the rumour spread throughout the department.”
Attiya was given her first murder case in 2015. She couldn’t sleep for two days after she saw the body. Even today, after having handled roughly thirty homicide cases, she still feels anxious at crime scenes. “When it’s a child, I think of my son,” she says. “If it’s someone’s brother who has been killed, I think of my own.”
When she took charge of Qandeel’s case, she pored over every piece of information she could find. She would wait for her children to go to sleep and comb through Qandeel’s social media pages, her photographs and videos. She watched every interview she could get her hands on. Her children made fun of her obsession and made up a name for it. “Mama has Qandeeliya,” they joked.
Attiya swears she could feel Qandeel’s presence in her home, drifting through each room. “She was a part of my life,” she says. Qandeel wasn’t just another homicide case. The police conducted sweeping raids and picked up dozens of people including members of Qandeel’s extended family, her sister, brother-in-law and cousins. Many had gone into hiding in nearby towns and villages because they feared being caught up in the case.
Attiya would receive constant phone calls from superiors wanting updates on her progress. “This was being talked about internationally, and we were getting calls every day about the case,” she says. The international media coverage tended towards the view that this was a Pakistani woman who had dared to defy the norm and been brutally killed by her own brother. There was pressure to show that the police—and thereby Pakistan—was doing everything possible to bring the killers to justice. “If we [the country] had been trying to make a modern image of ourselves in the world, then that image was being sullied by this case,” Attiya explains. “We wanted people to know that we were pursuing the investigation thoroughly.”
On 17 July, one day after Qandeel’s body was found, her brother Waseem was arrested. According to many reports, he had made no effort to hide and was spotted riding around on his motorbike in Shah Sadar Din’s main market the morning after he fled Multan. CPO Akram promptly held a press conference. He wanted the public to know that the police had been searching for Qandeel’s brother. The murder, he explained, “was probably done on the basis of honour.”12 He announced, first in Urdu and then in English, “And now I would like to tell you that we have arrested Waseem…He has confessed to the crime.” He asked for him to be brought into the room. “I’ve called for Waseem to come here now,” he told the journalists, “so you can have an interview with him.”
A striped purple cloth had been thrown over Waseem’s head and shoulders. As he walked in, CPO Akram repeated, “This is an honour-based murder.” He emphasized that Waseem had been apprehended so quickly because the police had used their “technical and operational teams and all the resources possible” in Dera Ghazi Khan. The forensic samples and autopsy report would also be rushed through a laboratory in Lahore, he said. Qandeel’s body had been found on Saturday morning, and CPO Akram promised to have the forensic results by Monday. For the third time, he said that Waseem had choked and strangled Qandeel for reasons of honour. The only question that remained in the investigation, he seemed to imply, was the extent to which any of Waseem’s friends had been involved in the murder. Even though Waseem had yet to be fully interrogated about why he had strangled his sister and stolen her money and jewellery, the police had no doubt that this was an honour killing.
The journalists requested that the police remove the hood covering Waseem’s face and CPO Akram obliged. Every camera in the room zoomed in on him. A dark, slender man, Waseem wore a pale blue shalwar kameez, the sleeves rolled up, and stared nonchalantly at the room. His curly hair, long enough to cover the tops of his ears, was slightly tousled. He was handcuffed.
“I would like to ask all of you, my friends, to ask him questions in a line, so that everyone’s questions can be answered,” CPO Akram requested.
A few reporters rushed forward with microphones. The CPO handed Waseem one of them, which he cradled between his cuffed hands.
“Yes, sir, what did you want to say?” Waseem asked one of the reporters in a thin, reedy voice.
“What’s your name?” a reporter asked.
“Muhammad Waseem.”
“What is your mother’s name?”
“I don’t know my mother’s name.”
“Why did you do this to Qandeel?”
The confession was broadcast live by every channel that had a reporter in the room. “The reason is the way she was coming on Facebook,” Waseem replied. “We Baloch cannot tolerate this.” The reporters pointed out that his sister had been putting photographs and videos on Facebook for six or seven years. Why had Waseem only been angered by them now?
“There were lots of other problems, OK,” Waseem whined. “The problem with the cleric. The media came to our house. That hadn’t happened before. She made it a problem and so I did what I did.”
CPO Akram helped him out. “So apparently what he is trying to say is that ever since she came in the limelight more and more, he felt pressure to do something.”
Waseem said he acted alone. No one in his family had known about his plan.
“How did you kill her?” a reporter called out. “Can you describe it?” Waseem nodded towards CPO Akram. “I did it the way sir described it.”
When asked to elaborate, he explained, “I gave her a tablet and then I strangled her.”
“Are you ashamed?”
“No,” Waseem said, sticking out his chin. “I have no shame. I am Baloch.”
This was a slap in the face to anyone who said he and his sister weren’t Baloch. Hadn’t he shown the kind of honour and self-respect that the Baloch were proud of?
Attiya cannot forget how cool and relaxed Waseem remained throughout the investigation. During his polygraph test he told police officials he had given his parents and his sister sleeping tablets in their milk the night before the murder. On 19 July Regional Police Officer Sultan Azam Temouri told the media Waseem had confessed that “the modern lifestyle adopted by Qandeel came under discussion with [Waseem’s] other siblings many a time and they were all against it.”13 His brother Arif, who lived in Saudi Arabia, had asked him to do something about their shameful sister. Their cousin Haq Nawaz, a man who had been picked up several times for petty crimes, could help him out, Arif suggested. By 26 July, Haq Nawaz had turned himself in to the police in Dera Ghazi Khan, but Attiya says she could find no proof of the conversation between Waseem and Arif. When Arif called his brother, he would do so online. There were no phone records, she says, and by the time she finally found a phone number for Arif, the phone had been turned off.
On 18 July a news report in the Express Tribune quoted Waseem as saying, “I made up my mind to kill [Qandeel] when her controversial video with Mufti Abdul Qavi went viral on social media…I had made up my mind that day, and I was waiting for my sister to come home.” Attiya says she tried to find some shred of evidence connecting Waseem’s actions with Mufti Abdul Qavi and his humiliation after the video of his meeting with Qandeel went viral. “I don’t like Mufti Qavi,” she says bluntly. “But I could never find any connection between him and the brothers. He came for interrogation every single time we asked. He answered all our questions. He gave us his phone willingly. There were no calls to Waseem. Not a single one. I called all the numbers that had called his phone and then Qandeel’s phone.” They belonged to reporters who had called Qandeel and then Mufti Qavi to get a quote or an interview about their meeting in that hotel.
But there are some people in Multan who whisper that Attiya is not as efficient as she seems. In the rambling warren that is the city’s district and sessions court, lawyers huddle together in a small courtyard to discuss the case. A man who claims to have been closely involved with the investigation and the court case says that Attiya deliberately left information out of her investigation report. “She has done nothing,” he says with scorn. “That bitch has done nothing. She has only made things worse.” The police are deliberately hiding links—including phone calls between Mufti Qavi and Qandeel’s brother Arif—because they wish to remain in the cleric’s good books. “Attiya is being dishonest,” he claims. “She’s clearly joined Mufti Qavi. She’s getting his money.”
Waseem did not falter during his interrogation, and the police could not bend the rules too much because they knew the media would pounce on any suggestion of torture. They didn’t want a single bruise on him and so at most kept Waseem standing in a cell or forced him to raise his arms and did not allow him to lower them for hours at a time. Waseem never complained and didn’t seem to care if he was allowed to sleep or not. Attiya tried other tactics. “If you scare them and show them what you have on them, they usually cave,” she says. Waseem wasn’t like that.
“She made our lives very difficult and I had no other solution,” he would say about Qandeel. “She just wouldn’t listen. I told my parents so many times to control her, to get her married. But she just would not listen. I had no other way to deal with this.”
After fourteen days of court-mandated custody, Attiya had one question left for him: Don’t you feel sorry for what you’ve done? She appealed to his emotions. “You and your sister spent your childhood together,” she said. “You must have played together. She was older than you. How did you decide to do this?”
Waseem thought about it briefly. “I do feel sorry,” he replied. “But at the time this was all I could think about doing.”
As she prepares to leave Qandeel’s case behind her, Attiya says she is still not satisfied with the investigation. She believes she did all she could within the limited amount of time specified for the police to submit a report of its findings—extra time was given due to the publicity the case was getting—but she is bitter about the resources and help she was given. “There isn’t the satisfaction of leaving every stone unturned,” she says. “For instance, I’ve only just received a reply from the FIA, three months after I requested its help in finding information about Qandeel’s social media accounts and her WhatsApp chats. The Saudi embassy never got back to us regarding a request to help locate Arif. The State Bank never got back to us about any accounts Qandeel might have had, and we never heard back about any properties she might have owned or rented.”
On the night of 15 July, when Waseem went back to Shah Sadar Din after the murder, he took Qandeel’s phone with him. Waseem had owned a mobile phone shop and so knew how to repair phones, but also how to wipe them. By the time he was arrested, he had erased all the data on Qandeel’s phone and passed a surge of power through it. None of her photographs, videos or messages were retrievable.
Safdar Shah and Qandeel’s parents told Attiya that they had found a laptop and a few diaries in Qandeel’s apartment in Karachi, but these items proved equally useless in providing a thread to follow for the investigation, Attiya says. The diaries were filled with quotes, some poetry and the lyrics to songs. There were scribbled notes reminding Qandeel what to say on her social media pages. Attiya gave them all back to Qandeel’s parents. As far as the police were concerned, these were just scraps of paper. The parents say they have been unable to use the password-protected laptop. Attiya says she searched the laptop but did not find “anything of use” in it.
On 6 December 2016 a judge indicted Waseem, Haq Nawaz and Abdul Basit—accused of driving the getaway car on the night of the murder.14 “We have all the forensic evidence we need, DNA reports, a polygraph test and the mobile phone data of the accused,” District Prosecutor Jam Salahuddin told me before the hearings in the case commenced. “They murdered her. They cannot be saved.”
But Attiya isn’t hopeful of the outcome of the trial. “I don’t have faith in the justice system,” Attiya says. “Some judges can be very cooperative, while others are not. The court follows its own will. I’ve seen this with a lot of cases—despite all the evidence, nothing happens.”
As we wrap up our meeting, Attiya says she wants to clarify something. “This case is important to me,” she explains. “It’s important because Qandeel was a human and this should not have happened to her. But I don’t agree with what she was doing.” She is confused by the people who say Qandeel is someone to look up to, and especially by the women who praise her attitude and behaviour. “Qandeel is no role model,” Attiya feels. “To make her a role model for young girls is very wrong. Look, Benazir Bhutto is a role model. She integrated with her society. Did you ever see the dupatta fall from her head? She knew how society thinks of women. We need to consider our society, our religion and a modern way of life equally. Of course women have the right to employment, the right to education, the right to good living standards. You can say you want to be totally unfettered, to have freedom, but is becoming Qandeel Baloch freedom?”
Why did Qandeel have to break so many rules so quickly? Attiya wonders.
When I say that I am surprised by her question, especially when I consider all the rules Attiya says she has broken to reach this point in her career, she explains gently, “Society cannot change so quickly. You need to give it time. Maybe in time it will become how you want it to be. No matter how modern we become, as Muslims we cannot expect to have total freedom to do whatever we like. After all, we won’t live in this world for ever, will we? We will return to Allah and then we will have to answer for all that we have done in this world. So you have to think about that.”
She cringes when she recalls how she had to watch some of Qandeel’s videos with her colleagues. “The men couldn’t look at me and I couldn’t look at them. It was so awkward.” She hears women talk about wanting the freedom to behave as they please. “I don’t think as women we are missing some kind of freedom,” she says. “Do you?”
It’s time for her to meet the next investigating officer, the man who will take over the case from her. Some of her colleagues need to sit in on the meeting, but there aren’t enough chairs in the room for all of them. Three of them sit on a charpoy that has been pushed into a corner. One puts his feet up; the other leans against the wall and dangles his legs over the side. It is the same charpoy that Attiya first saw Qandeel’s body lying on.
“The day she was murdered, I got a phone call from a friend,” Malik Azam says. “He said, ‘It’s you. You did this.’ ” The Daily Pakistan story revealing Qandeel’s identity had set in motion a chain of events that would end in her murder, Azam’s friend said.
“So when she was putting up all those photos and making videos about Imran Khan, her brother didn’t feel dishonoured then?” Azam retorted. “When she posed for the whole world, he didn’t feel dishonoured then? But when I run a story he suddenly feels dishonoured?”
He hung up on his friend. They haven’t spoken since.
When I meet Qandeel’s parents in November 2016 Anwar bibi makes the same accusation. She says that the media is responsible in part for her daughter’s murder. If the media had not revealed her real name or made such a big deal of the Qavi meeting, no one from Shah Sadar Din would have cared about Fouzia Azeem. People would not have jeered at her son, and he would not have been driven to kill his sister.
It’s an accusation that Malik Azam and his bureau chief have heard many times since July 2016—not just from Qandeel’s parents and those who spoke out against her murder, but from colleagues in the industry as well.
Azam’s bureau chief, Shaukat Iqbal, is scornful of the accusation. “All we revealed was her real name,” Iqbal says. “That’s it. The issues that arose after that were her own family’s problems. We didn’t create those.” He and Azam do not believe they did anything wrong by printing pictures of Qandeel’s passport. “A passport is nothing personal,” Iqbal says. “If you go to an embassy or apply for a visa, don’t you give them your passport? So what?”
He does not regret the Daily Pakistan coverage, although, “I think we underestimated the story,” Iqbal says. “Someone else would have run a bigger story, made a bigger deal of it.” As for the journalists who criticize the Daily Pakistan, he just has one question for them: if the story about her real name was such a danger to her, then why did every other news outlet run it as well? If the Daily Pakistan is responsible for what happened to Qandeel, then so is every other newspaper and TV channel that ran a story on Qandeel’s real name and where she was from.
Iqbal believes that Anwar bibi blames the media because she does not want to admit that Qandeel’s whole family conspired to kill her. They were greedy for her money, he says. They watched Qandeel’s interviews and saw the clothes she was wearing, the lifestyle she boasted of, the “side businesses” she claimed to have and the cars she was driven around in. They believed that she was withholding money from them. “This hen was laying golden eggs for them, and they wanted all the eggs at once,” Iqbal speculates. “They didn’t get that and they slaughtered their hen.” After all, Iqbal and Malik Azam say, look at the pictures of Qandeel’s parents on the day they called the police to their home in Multan. Look at the clean white shalwar kameez and turban the father is wearing and the embroidered kameez the mother has on. Did they change after they found their daughter’s body and called the police? Or did they sleep in these clean, ironed clothes? “The mother is wearing a party dress!” Iqbal exclaims. “Who goes to sleep in such nice clothes?” Their daughter, he says, was nothing special. Of course he feels sad that she was killed, but he does not understand why she is still being talked about. “What was her profession?” he asks. “Simply, she was a call girl. No other word for it. I’m sorry to say this, may Allah forgive me, but that’s what she was.”
When Waseem returned to Shah Sadar Din after the murder, news of what he had done quickly spread. People in the village say his cousins, uncles and friends congratulated him. They said he had done the right thing. No matter that they had called him shameless. “A man with no honour can discover honour at any moment,” they assured each other.
It would be hard to find anyone in Shah Sadar Din today who does not know Qandeel’s name. I make my way down uneven sandy trails in a large graveyard, stepping past empty chocolate and biscuit wrappers and dried dog shit as I search for her grave. The previous month, October 2016, Qandeel’s father told a reporter, “Following my daughter’s wish, I have installed Pakistan’s flag on her grave.”15 But I cannot see a flag anywhere in the graveyard. Two villagers standing near a grave ask me who I’m looking for. They point to the far left corner of the graveyard. They have become used to people—mostly the media—coming here searching for Qandeel. Someone has planted a thin reedy sapling a few feet tall next to the grave, which is just another mound of dirt like the many others around it. It is not covered in concrete or marble like some of the others. There is no marker, no sign of her name and no Pakistani flag. Without the villagers, it would have been impossible to find Qandeel in this graveyard.