Pakistan: Teen shoots sister while recording TikTok video

Police in Pakistan are looking for a teenage girl who allegedly shot and killed her sister while recording a TikTok video.

The incident occurred in a small village in the Gujrat district of central Pakistan's Punjab province on Friday.

However, there was a delay in the matter being investigated as the family allegedly tried to prevent the incident from being known.

But police eventually received a complaint from the girl's brother, which led to the filing of a case against the suspect.

Police searching for the shooter

"It looks as if it was an accident but it would be too early to conclude," Muhammad Naseer, from the Sarai Alamgir police who is investigating the case, told the German news agency DPA on Monday. 

Naseer said that they had visited the crime scene and collected evidence.

"We are searching for the girl who allegedly shot her younger sister," he said.

The incident is not the first time when a young individual lost their life while recording on TikTok.

A woman in Florida, the United States, died in an accidental shooting in May of 2023 while she was recording TikTok videos with a 20-year-old woman who was using a rifle as a prop.

And in January of last year a man fell 70 feet (21.3 meters) to his death while he was filming a TikTok video near a cliff in Puerto Rico.

Pakistan's push against TikTok

There have been numerous calls for a complete ban on TikTok in Pakistan, and court rulings have temporarily blocked the Chinese video-sharing platform.

In late 2020, Pakistan banned TikTok after a "number of complaints from different segments of the society against immoral/indecent content on the video-sharing application," the Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said at the time.

The telecom regulator said it had issued warnings to TikTok to moderate unlawful content, but the social media company had failed to comply with its instructions.

However, the platform was reinstated after ten days. "TikTok is being unlocked after assurance from management that they will block all accounts repeatedly involved in spreading obscenity and immorality," the regulator said at the time.

In early 2021, the regulator once again called for a nationwide ban, and a court in the northwestern city of Peshawar ordered the communications regulator to block the app over videos it deemed contrary to the conservative country's moral values.

But at the beginning of April the same year it was unblocked, and another ban later the same year over "inappropriate content," was also temporary.

A provincial court lifted the suspension of the social media service but ordered it to address complaints that it hosted objectionable content.