YouTuber Saad Ur Rehman, popularly known as Ducky Bhai, and his wife Aroob Jatoi were detained by the CIA police in Lahore’s Model Town on Tuesday night after they displayed a weapon during a social media vlog.
The couple was released after they removed the content and no case was registered against them.
The YouTuber and his wife have not released a statement.
Ducky Bhai is a popular vlogger with over eight million subscribers on his YouTube page. He is also known for his gaming channel, Ducky Extra, which has over two million subscribers. The vlogger lands himself into controversy from time to time — such as his Twitter argument with a woman who draped a Pakistani flag around her dog’s neck in August 2020 — but stays a favourite amongst his fans. He won the Pakistan International Screen Award (PISA) YouTuber of the Year Award in November 2021.
The crackdown on pictures of guns online comes after Punjab Inspector General Dr Usman Anwar ordered strict legal action against people involved in the display of weapons on social media and in celebratory gunfire. The IG said that those displaying weapons in TikTok videos should be brought to justice without discrimination in a statement released by the police on August 8.
Ducky Bhai is not the first person to have been arrested for brandishing weapons on social media. According to Dawn, a man was arrested for displaying weapons on a social media platform in 2022.
The Saddar police, on the instructions of District Police Officer Ahmad Nawaz Shah, arrested Muhammad Shahroz, a known name on TikTok, for uploading a video on the platform in which he is seen displaying illicit weapons.