That's the voice of a Pakistani radio journalist, Sonia Bukhari.
she hosted a cookery show where women in
Northwest Pakistan shared their favorite dishes with her.
I'm now looking at a picture of Sonia from 2014.
I wouldn't show it, even if this was video and not a podcast.
It's Sonia lying dead.
And there's a postmortem report, it's brief and brutal.
It says one entry wound to front temporal bone. One exit wound.
In other words, Sonia Bukhari died from a single gunshot.
Facing her killer.
I didn't do justice to my talents.
I’ve been unlucky in so many things
That’s Zahid Khan - Sonia’s husband
in a YouTube video in 2015, a year after her death.
He's strolling in front of the huge Faisal Mosque in the capital, Islamabad.
The video describes Zahid as a lecturer and poet.
The more I got sensitive, the more I got mature,
the more I started loving reading poetry and writing poetry.
So how does this self-proclaimed sensitive poet and his murdered wife
in Pakistan fit into a series of podcasts
about sexual misconduct in British universities?
Well, of all the stories we've been investigating
over the last two years, this is the most extraordinary.
This is Al Jazeera investigates.
I'm Deborah Davis, a reporter with Al Jazeera’s I-Unit.
This is episode five of our six part series called Degrees of Abuse.
My name's Alex Howlett.
I’m a journalist with the I-Unit.
In the first four episodes,
we heard from several women who shared their experiences of sexual harassment
and how their universities didn't investigate their complaints.
One of the main issues we discovered is that even when multiple women complain
about the same man, the universities don't hear the complaints together,
so they don't see the evidence.
Proving sexual misconduct is usually a pattern of behavior, not just a one off.
The final two episodes show what a dramatically different picture
can be revealed if you do investigate thoroughly and pull
all the evidence together. And that's what we've done here.
Our investigation began not with that 2014 murder in Pakistan,
but in Scotland in February 2018, with a date that didn't go well.
So we originally met after matching
with one another on the dating app Tinder.
He was kind of presenting himself
as a feminist media scholar.
Dr Rebecca Harrison, - or just Becca - was a lecturer
at Glasgow University in Theater, Film and television studies.
Zahid Khan was a Ph.D.
Media student, apparently at another Scottish university.
He was older than Becca with an established career,
so she thought they'd have a lot in common, too much as it turned out.
But that was something that didn't feel right, and certainly
in the first half an hour or so, he kind of did this big reveal .
Oh, actually, I'm doing it in your department.
I just didn't want to tell you because I didn't think you'd come on the day.
But I also felt like he had
deliberately obscured who he was and therefore lied to me to get me on a date
because there is absolutely categorically no way I would want to date
someone who's a student in my department.
I then said, well, OK, I'm really uncomfortable with that.
This is no longer a date.
Becca says he kept reaching out to hold her hands.
And so I had to keep pulling my hands away from him and saying, Please,
can you not do that?
This is making me quite uncomfortable.
I just want to remind you it's not a date.
And this was again, just like another enormous red flag,
he said. Your body
and your lips are saying no, but your eyes are saying yes.
He then asked me if he could kiss
me, and I said, No, this isn't going to happen.
And then after me categorically saying no to him, kissing me,
he just grabbed my face and forcefully kissed me
and put his tongue into my mouth and I pulled away,
Becca said she told Khan she needed the bathroom,
grabbed her bag and left.
Becca checked and found
Khan was indeed a second year PhD student in her department.
She wrote it off as a bad date, but a couple of months later she heard
he'd been offered a teaching role, which would include young undergraduates.
So in June 2018, she decided to complain.
There was absolutely no way that I could allow him.
To do what he done to me, to people again who were more vulnerable,
who had an even bigger kind of gap in the power dynamic between them.
All British universities have a policy on acceptable behavior,
Glasgow's Code of Conduct says students must not use threatening, offensive,
indecent or violent language or behavior, including sexual violence or abuse.
Becca believed that applied to Zahid Khan grabbing her hands
and forcefully kissing her despite her repeated protests.
In June 2018, she reported him
through the university's official complaints procedure.
The human resources department didn't reply for two months.
The email to Becca is read by an actor
30th of August 2018.
This case is more complicated than is usual.
The student is known to us due to an ongoing police investigation,
and this is the reason we've not yet been able to take any action against him
as it may prejudice that investigation.
I wish I could say I was shocked, but I wasn't.
I actually weirdly just felt vindicated because it supported
everything that I had thought about him and made me think, no,
I was absolutely right to have those feelings.
That was reinforced when HR told Becca that
three other women had complained about Zahid Khan.
At least one of whom went to the police.
The woman who complained to the police
doesn't want us to use her real name, so we're calling her Patti.
She's a social worker.
She was newly divorced with two young daughters when she met Khan in Edinburgh
through a dating app.
And if you're wondering when Pakistan
is going to crop up in this story, the answer is now.
During a phone call, Patti told us part of Zahid Khan's appeal
was what he said to her about his tragic past in his home country.
I will never forget it, he said.
I have never told anyone this before, but I am here doing my Ph.D.
in the memory of my fiancée Sonya, who was shot dead
because she was a journalist.
We've spoken to several other women who are involved with Zahid Khan.
None of them wanted their names used.
one woman confirmed Zahid Khan also told her his fiancee was killed in Pakistan
because she was a journalist and he found her dead body at their home.
Another woman we spoke too says Khan claimed
his fiancee was crushed to death by a lorry while he was working abroad.
But yet another woman says he told her all his family were killed in an air raid
and never mentioned to fiancee or a wife.
The social worker, Patti didn't know any of this
when she began her relationship with Zahid Khan in early 2017.
That was soon after he arrived in Scotland to start his PhD.
I mean, I remember him talking about moving in to live with me in Edinburgh.
And, you know, I felt, Gosh, that's really quick.
But, you know, he was incredibly charming and charismatic.
He moved in with her and her two daughters.
He talked of marriage.
But within months, the relationship began to sour.
She says he wanted her to cut off contracts with friends
and accused her of seeing other men
It had now merged into this emotionally abusive relationship,
I remember one day clearly him grabbing my phone
and reading through all of my messages and throwing my phone and smashing it,
calling me a bitch all of the time and a slut.
We've spoken to another woman who had a short relationship with Zahid Khan.
The woman says she spotted Patti on Khan's social media.
She reached out to warn Patti that on their dates, he'd
become increasingly impatient and angry.
She also said she'd written to Glasgow University
to tell them she believed Zahid Khan was a compulsive liar.
Patti says she wasn't ready to listen to these warnings.
Already at this stage, I felt like I was in love with the guy
so I kind of just didn't pay heed to her warnings.
What did she say specifically about him?
Oh, that he was extremely controlling and coercive.
And again, he wanted to get married to her, etc.
So, you know, painting a picture of similar repeating pattern of behavior.
Patti said she needed to know more about Khan's past through social media.
She made contact with a woman in America who knew Khan before he came to Scotland.
She met Khan in China when they were both studying at a university in Beijing.
So I started investigating and I felt that this other American women
would hold the key
to many of the unknowns about him, which indeed it turned out she did.
She said she always saw him talking to a child on Zoom or whatever
it was at the time, and she always felt, Gosh, maybe that's his child.
She told me that they were engaged and that, you know, he had applied
for a visa to go to the states, but that his visa was turned down.
We've confirmed Zaid Khan didn't tell the American student
he was already married and the child was indeed his
when his plans to find a new wife and relocate to America failed.
He left China and returned to Pakistan in the summer of 2014.
On the 21st of October that year, his wife,
Sonia, was murdered, there.
By early 2018, the social worker Patti felt the relationship with
Zahid Khan had broken down, and she had enough worries to make a formal complaint
about him to Glasgow University, where he was a year into his Ph.D.,
As well as describing aspects of the relationship.
Patti told the university about what she calls his dark,
troubled history in Pakistan.
She detailed his different versions of Sonia's killing and urged
the university to do its own investigation into Khan's background.
Patti filed her complaint on the 21st of February 2018.
By coincidence, that's the same day the lecturer Becca went on a date
with Zahid Khan, where she says he grabbed her hands and forcefully kissed her
once Becca discovered he could be teaching young students.
She filed her own complaint because she felt the behavior
she'd witnessed put other women at risk.
So by mid 2018, Glasgow University had at least two formal complaints
about Zahid Khan and a warning letter all from women he'd been involved with.
The more we dug into this story, the more important it became to know
more about Zahid Khan’s history before he arrived at Glasgow University.
So time to shift our investigation to Pakistan.
What really happened to Sonia and does
it link to the multiple complaints about her husband?
four years later at Glasgow University,
one of the great advantages of Al Jazeera is our global network of reporters.
I’m Suddaf Chaudry, an investigative journalist based in Pakistan.
I'm going to try to find out what really happened Zahid Khan's wife, Sonia.
I’m heading to the town where they lived.
leaving Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, en route to Mansehra
to meet law enforcement who investigated Sonia's case.
It's about two and a half hours north.
I speak Urdu, but I'm heading for a region
where the main languages are Pashto or Hindko
so I'm teaming up with Syed who's a local journalist.
He can translate and he's also got good police contacts.
In fact, he remembers this case as being unusual.
Syed just told us that he reported on the story, but he found it
interesting that no family members actually wanted to discuss
this brutal murder.
Syed and I have just arrived at Mansehra Police Station.
The police officer is saying that the case file
that we have detained does not have enough information.
We need to locate the police files that were submitted internally.
Syed had has just been notified
that two of the officers that worked on the investigation have retired,
so we would be locating their telephone numbers and hoping
to connect with them at a later date.
OK. It's taken a few days, but
I finally got a pile of police documents in English and Urdu.
There's a statement from the day of the murder.
October 21st, 2014,
it's by the police officer who spoke to Zahid Khan
who said he was lecturing at another university when the murder happened.
The officer's statement recording the interview with Khan is read by an actor.
He reported that the dead body of his wife from the hospital emergency ward,
he was called by unknown persons and told his wife had been shot and injured.
Local people brought her to the hospital, but she died on the way.
He says she has no enemies.
He says she was killed by unknown accused entering the house.
Well that knocks down all the versions Zahid Khan told to different women.
There's almost nothing more in the police file for three years,
and that seems to be because Zahid Khan can't give them any more help
in identifying the killer.
13 August 2017. Current status of the case.
We have heard the plaintiff is in England and we have no idea
how to direct the investigation.
With each twist and turn of this story, the two threads in Pakistan and Scotland
become ever more closely woven together.
But for now, that's where we're leaving the first half of this story.
Glasgow University said it couldn't comment on individual cases,
but takes all allegations seriously, investigates them fully and works
hard to ensure the safety and security of everyone on university campuses.
Zahid Khan told us the claims made against him
were arbitrary, unfounded and false, and that we published them at our peril.
He also said two of his accusers have been prosecuted, but he had not.
We will explain that in the next episode,
Also more from Suddaf, about what happened in Pakistan after Sonia’s murder.
And we’ll reveal why that's relevant to what happens in Scotland.
After Glasgow University received multiple complaints about Zahid Khan
and how they dealt with them.
If you've been affected
by any of these stories, please reach out and talk to someone.
We've compiled a list of help lines and support organizations on a website.
You can find it at ajiunit.com
Degrees of abuse, as reported by me, Alex Howlett and Deborah Davies,
This episode was produced by Kevin Hirten and audio edited by Craig Pennington
and Leo Sofogiannis. Sound mixed by TVC Soho
Jo De Frias is the executive producer
and Phil Rees is Al Jazeera’s director of investigative journalism.
If you haven't already subscribe to Al Jazeera Investigates
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