Hora Sadat, a 25 year-old, vibrant woman who started working for a Youtube channel months before the Taliban took over Kabul, rose to fame by producing cheerful, happy and entertaining videos. She seemed a fearless and unconventional Afghan woman, who filmed in the streets and who was often seen laughing and socializing with her friends. Her popularity surged in those early days when the Taliban’s policies toward women didn’t seem to be a complete removal of all women from society. Thousands followed the channel, eager to catch her latest video. But the Taliban would exact a brutal price for her audacity.
On July 13, 2023, Sadat and her two sisters, who were helping her in the production of the videos, were arrested on charges of “moral corruption,” according to the Taliban. They were released on August 10.
A friend of the sisters who spoke with them after they were released from the Taliban prison tells Zan Times that the sisters were severely tortured for their activities on Youtube. “The Taliban threatened the sisters by saying ‘We can’t kill you now, because it could be traced back to us. But be aware that we will not let you live,’” explains the source, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
Eleven days after her release from prison, the young Youtuber was dead. The Taliban claimed she was poisoned.
Zan Times has followed the story of the life and death of Hora Sadat for almost a year and have uncovered that Hora Sadat wasn’t poisoned as the Taliban insisted. Two credible sources say Hora Sadat was killed after she was ordered to visit the Kabul Police Headquarters and her body showed obvious signs of torture. When the news of her death reached social media, the Taliban became the logical suspect in her death. As rumours swirled, the Taliban released a 20-minute video documentary, in which they forced Hora Sadat’s family to publicly confirm what Zan Times discovered is a false story.
In the video documentary produced by the Taliban’s Police Headquarter in Kabul, her mother, Masooma, said, “On Monday night [August 21], Hora was invited to her friend’s home. In the morning at 8 a.m., when she came home, she was unwell. She vomited in the living room.” Then, her mother continued: “She said, ‘Mom, they killed me. They have poisoned me.” Masooma added that her family took Hora to two different hospitals but that her daughter died within hours of falling ill. “This is not the work of Islamic Emirate; it is the work of her friends,” insisted her mother, whose face was covered by a black scarf in the Taliban-produced video. She also added that the Taliban had arrested a young woman and man in relation to her daughter’s death.
The video also features the Taliban officials involved in the investigation into Hora Sadat’s death. Both officials claimed that Sadat’s family informed the Taliban that Hora had ingested rat poison. Then, in an oddly detailed explanation from a regime known for its brutality, Mawlawi Mohammad Kazem, the director of electronic crimes at Kabul Police Headquarters, ruled out physical violence as a cause of death before confirming the poisoning: “The forensic investigation shows that she was not killed as result of beating or torture, she was killed as a result of rat poison.” Furthermore, he ruled her death as either suicide or a killing by her friends.
The Taliban police spokesman, Khaled Zadran, has a slightly different story about Sadat’s death to that of his colleague, Mawlawi Mohammad Kazem. For Zadran, the friends didn’t kill her. “Now, our investigation shows that the cause of her death was a personal issue. But the culprits are some of her friends who caused her to become angry and lose her mind and when she reached home, she ingested poisonous material and killed herself,” he said in the video, obviously reading from a pre-written statement. “The result of the forensic investigation shows that except poisonous material, she has used nothing else and there is no sign of crime or any other kind of actions on her body.”
One source who saw Hora Sada’s body before she was buried refutes the Taliban’s explanation that she was poisoned, telling Zan Times, “She had a wound on her chest, one of her neck vessels was cut and her back was completely blacked as result of beating. Only her face was intact.”
“There was no poison in question,” another source with knowledge of Hora Sadat tells Zan Times. “She was killed by the Taliban and her family was ordered to pick up her body from Isteqlal Hospital,” the source adds. “The Taliban threatened her family to never speak a word about what happened to her, but when the news of her death was posted on the social media and everyone started to blame the Taliban, they came back and created this story that Hora was poisoned by her friends,” the source said, asking for complete anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Taliban.
“That Monday night, she was at home with her family,” the source who saw her that night, tells Zan Times. “She left home early Tuesday morning [August 22] after receiving a phone call from someone at the Taliban police headquarter who asked her to come,” the source explains. “We never saw her alive again. The next thing we saw, the Taliban soldiers surrounded her house and they said that she was no longer alive.”
Sloppy cover-up
The Taliban video documentary, which is titled “The Real Story of the Death of a Youtuber Girl Named Hora Sadat in Kabul,” is particularly puzzling. For one, Hora Sadat was not the first or only woman to have died under suspicious circumstances since the Taliban retook power in August 2021. At Zan Times, we have documented the killing of at least 14 women, all of whom had public roles. They included teachers, students, nurses, policewomen, activists, and a former politician, Mursal Nabizada, who was one of the few MPs who remained in the country after the Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021 and was a vocal critic of the Taliban regime and was killed in her home in Kabul in January 2023. While her family spoke of “unknown assailants” in interviews with the media, the Taliban quickly arrested her bodyguard, stating that the motive for the killing was robbery. There was no further information about her case and what happened to her bodyguard.
In another case, Hosna Sadat, an actress, died after the Taliban visited her house on December 1, 2023. Four days later, the Taliban’s Police Headquarter released a video, in which they claimed that she had mental issues and had committed suicide. Although her family is seen confirming the Taliban’s claim in the video, her friends and former colleagues tell Zan Times that she had no mental health issues.
In Hora Sadat’s case, the Taliban went out of their way to convince the public that they had nothing to do with her death. Yet, their attempt to offer an official explanation for the Youtuber’s death was so unusual that the video itself contained clues that helped guide our investigation.
Released on September 3, 2023, nearly two weeks after her death, the video starts with several Taliban entering Sadat’s family home, where Sadat’s mother and brother are interviewed. The people who spoke in the Taliban documentary often contradict each other, even about how she died. In the video, her family emphasizes that the “Islamic Emirate” has nothing to do with her death and that her friends poisoned her with an unknown “dangerous” material that Hora Sadat brought back home. Her mother stresses that none of the family knew what the substance was and that she showed it to a doctor, who said “it is a very dangerous thing,” also without identifying it.
Soon, rat poison is mentioned. In the Taliban video, a doctor from Alamee Hospital as well as Taliban officials claim that her family told them Hora had ingested rat poison though her family never mention rat poison in the video.
The role of Zamir Hashemi, the man arrested in relation to Sadat’s death, is equally confusing in that video, as is the status of Hora’s personal life. A local councillor, interviewed in the Sadat family home, claimed that Hora had a four-year relationship with a man named Zamir and she was meant to marry him. Yet, elsewhere in the video, Mawlawi Mohammad Kazem claimed that she’s been in a five-year relationship with Zamir.
Those claims clashed with the reality that Hora had made no secret of the fact that she had been engaged with a male Youtuber (not Zamir Hashemi) two years ago, though they separated months before her death; both were very active on Youtube and publicly talked of their love. Would a woman risk being in a relationship with two men at the same time in a country run by the Taliban?
Zamir Hashemi is interviewed in the video. His face is blurred and his statements only add more confusion to the story. He also claimed Sadat committed suicide.
Zamir Hashemi confirmed to Zan Times that he knew Hora Sadat, but refused to provide further information beyond that he and the woman arrested in relation to Hora Sada’s death were freed by the Taliban in the spring of 2024 due to a “lack of evidence” connecting them to the murder.
When Zan Times reached Taliban police spokesman Khaled Zadran for a comment about the finding of our investigation, he said, “Those who claim that Hora Sadat was killed by mujahedeen or the Taliban, they should submit their evidence to us; they should register a complaint – we will look into it.” He emphasized that Sadat’s death was a suicide.
Wiping evidence from the web
The story of Hora Sadat, her life and her death, involves more than that one Taliban-created video. She was a prolific content producer who had posted more than 300 videos to a Youtube channel called Star Funs. Those videos were suddenly removed in early 2024, months after her death, and the name of the Youtube channel was changed to Salam Afghanistan. Although the manager of the channel has not responded to Zan Times requests to comment about the videos, an employee confirmed that the Sadat videos were removed at the request of the Taliban. “They have threatened the managers to remove or hide all her videos which might give clues to why she was killed,” the source tells Zan Times.
Her death came as a shock for many active Afghan women who had thought they might be able to maintain a semblance of the life they had before August 2021. Some female Youtubers were so fearful that they stopped working after hearing the news of her death.
“The day [I heard] Hora was killed, I was terrified. I stopped working, thinking that this job isn’t worth being killed for,” says a 22-year-old female Youtuber from Kabul who is the breadwinner of her family of seven. She tells Zan Times that she was beaten on one occasion for filming outside with children and barely fled arrest. “Now, I spend my days at home, thinking about the past and what I should do to support my family.”
