A court in Islamabad has sentenced 23-year-old Umar Hayat to death for the murder of Sana Yousaf, a 17-year-old social media influencer who was shot dead in her family home in June 2024. Additional District and Sessions Judge Muhammad Afzal Majoka announced the verdict on 19 May, and the detailed 27-page judgment published the following day found that there were "no mitigating circumstances" and that Hayat deserved "no leniency." The court also ordered him to pay 2.5 million Pakistani rupees (approximately $9,000) in compensation to the victim's family, and handed down concurrent sentences of ten years each for robbery and house-trespass.

Hayat, the son of a retired government official and himself a TikToker, had travelled from Jaranwala — a city in Punjab province — to Islamabad days before the killing, intending to wish Yousaf a happy birthday. When she refused to meet him, he forced his way into her home on 2 June, and shot her twice in the chest during an argument. Her mother and aunt witnessed the killing. Hayat was arrested within 20 hours in Faisalabad, roughly 320 kilometres south of the capital. He subsequently confessed before a magistrate, admitting he had developed a one-sided obsession with Yousaf following online interactions, and that jealousy and suspicion had driven him to kill her. Although he retracted that confession the day before the verdict, the court ruled that a confession recorded by a magistrate in accordance with the law is presumed true, and that Hayat had failed to demonstrate any coercion. The judgment noted that prosecution evidence was "overwhelming," including two eyewitnesses, forensic fingerprints matched to Hayat via national identity records, the recovered murder weapon, and the victim's stolen mobile phone.

Yousaf had built a following of more than one million on TikTok and half a million on Instagram, sharing content about fashion, skincare routines, favourite cafés, and everyday life. Her father, Syed Yousaf Hassan, described the verdict as "a lesson for all such criminals in society." The death sentence must still be confirmed by the Islamabad High Court, as required under Pakistani criminal procedure. According to Justice Project Pakistan, a Karachi-based NGO, more than 6,000 prisoners were on death row in Pakistan in 2024, though executions have not been carried out since 2019.

Yousaf's murder reignited a national debate about violence against women and the safety of female content creators online. Human rights activists described her killing as part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence in Pakistan. Her death also prompted a troubling backlash: some users, predominantly men, questioned her choice to share content publicly and called for her social media accounts to be deleted. Digital rights advocates and women's rights activists condemned this reaction as misogynistic, arguing that it reflected the hostile environment female voices face online in the country.