A man traveled more than 700 miles to his ex-wife’s Chicago home and shot her dead in a murder-suicide after she wrote about their relationship woes on TikTok, according to reports.
Sania Khan, 29, and her former husband, Raheel Ahmad, 36, were both found with gunshot wounds to the head in her Windy City condo last week, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The pair were married less than a year and divorced in May. Ahmad, of Alpharetta, Georgia, traveled to Illinois last week before the violence exploded.
Khan, a Pakistani American photographer, had frequently described the pressures she faced in seeking a split with Ahmad.
“Going through a divorce as a South Asian woman feels like you failed at life sometimes,” she wrote in one post. “The way the community labels you, the lack of support you receive, and the pressure to stay with someone because ‘what will people say’ makes it harder for women to leave marriages that they shouldn’t have been in to begin with.”
She wrote that her family exerted pressure on her to keep the union intact — with some even threatening suicide if she refused.
Police responded to Khan’s apartment after Ahmad’s family reported him missing and expressed concern for his welfare.
After they knocked on Khan’s door, officers heard a single gunshot and an audible groan, the outlet reported. They found Khan dead inside and Ahmad suffering from a mortal gunshot wound.
On her professional website, Khan, a former flight attendant, said she grew up in Tennessee before moving to Chicago in 2021. She had planned to move back to her home state before she was killed.
A friend told the Sun-Times that Khan was a social worker before she became a flight attendant to support herself financially while pursuing her passion for photography.
Others close to Khan told Time magazine that Ahmad was a controlling presence in her life and stifled her with unending scrutiny.
“He monitored what she wore,” Gabriella Bordo told the outlet. “He was wary about who she hung out with, how she presented herself.”
Bordo also asserted that Ahmad’s motive in visiting his ex was clear.
“There was no reconciling,” Bordo said. “This man did not go there to salvage a marriage. He went there with a gun for a reason.”
Others said Khan had long considered getting a restraining order against her former spouse but never did.
