by Angela Carson
Since 9/11, I’m the foreigner to explore Balochistan, Pakistan the longest, 50+ days across 10 districts in 2021 (+ 20 days in 2024 = 72 days total). Travelling there was the most fun I’d had in decades and the closest I felt to a proper explorer since the 90s when I solo road-tripped places like Mexico and Bosnia. I shared about 25 YouTube videos showcasing Balochistan, gave a speech about Balochistan at the 2021 Islamabad Tourism Forum, and promoted its beauty to anyone who would listen. It’s a breathtaking region with kind and gracious people who did not choose to live in an area of unrest or unparalleled corruption.
After leaving in 2021, I felt a daily pull back to Balochistan. I saved up money for two years in Malaysia with my branding and marcom startup company and, in February 2024, returned to Pakistan with the goal to grow awareness and demand for tourism in Balochistan. I established a Pakistan branch of my company in Islamabad, which is also where I set up my home and office.
Things moved quickly. I created new tours to Balochistan that were promoted via a reputable local travel company. At a meeting in Quetta, I gained approval by now-ex-Additional Chief Secretary Zahid Saleem at Balochistan Home Department to develop tourism in two districts in Balochistan that had never had tours created or marketed for them – Noshki and Jhal Magsi.
In May, I gained approval by the Managing Director of Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (PTDC) to rebrand Balochistan Tourism (new website, logo, and social media targeted to foreigners). The only requirement from PTDC was that the project be funded through Balochistan’s budget.
In my quest to gain that funding (Rs1.1M / US$3,800 to start + Rs210k / US$730 monthly) from the government of Balochistan because PTDC didn’t have a proper budget in 2024, I faced a litany of challenges. Since 1996, I’ve had the same career and worked in eight countries. Yet nothing prepared me for the lies, attempts to extort me for sex, almost being raped, and the abuse of power that I was about to experience – all exclusively by men and women in government (please note: NEVER from anyone at PTDC, Balochistan Home Department, Levies, Police, ATF, or Quetta city administration).
Abuse of power is a problem worldwide, it’s not a Pakistani thing. What makes Pakistan unique is the systemic pattern of abuse that is accepted (and expected!) … and how some men & women in power cover it up for one another.
WHY I’M WRITING THIS
The reason I am sharing my story is singular: I learned the man who tried to rape me, (Syed Shahnawaz / Shahnawaz Fawad Afridi) has allegedly raped local women in Quetta and possibly Islamabad, and is a known trafficker and pimp. Two high-profile men in government in Quetta whom I trust each had personal knowledge of reports filed against the man. But the man allegedly called in favours and had all evidence of his past cases and police reports destroyed so his victims will never receive justice. The women he’s hurt can not come forward without fearing for their safety or bringing shame to their families.
But I can. So this is my story.
MY HOPE IS THAT VICTIMS WILL COME FORWARD and allow an officer at a Women Police Station to take their report. See how to do that on the homepage.
ATTEMPTS TO EXTORT ME FOR SEX
Oddly, I have apples-for-apples experiences by two different Chief Minister’s secretaries who tried to extort me for sex. This one fact is something that makes me wonder if the culture of abuse I experienced between the ex CM’s administration and the current one is the root cause, that one is more accepting of this type of behaviour than another? I’ll let you be the judge.
EXTORTION ATTEMPT 2021
On January 7, 2021, ex-CM (now Pakistan’s Federal Minister of Commerce) Jam Kamal Khan’s secretary was acting as a liaison for me to Balochistan Tourism, who would be facilitating a vehicle for my initial 2-week vlogging trip. At that time, no rental company in Karachi would take me to the 7 or 8 districts I had planned, and I was the first person to map a route to some places that no foreigner had visited in 30 years. There was a mutual interest in this trip happening.
The secretary’s name was Sahibzada (never learned his surname) and when the deal was made with the Tourism Board, he asked for his “reward” for helping me. I brushed it off and pretended I didn’t know what he was inferring. When he asked to visit my hotel alone, I stopped communicating. He then blew up the deal with Balochistan Tourism. For two days I tried to fix it but eventually I had to contact CM Jam Kamal and share the WhatsApp chat with Sahibzada, asking to come to my room and eventually ghosting me. The CM apologised and asked me to give him one hour. After an hour, his right-hand man contacted me and told me two things:
- That Sahibzada had been removed from his duties, placed on leave, and would never work for the CM Jam Kamal’s administration again. There was an honour to how seriously this behaviour was taken that I appreciated.
- From now on, I would collaborate directly with the head of each district for logistics and support … and that a truck and trusted driver were being sent from Quetta for that first trip.
EXTORTION ATTEMPT 2024
One of the first things I did when I moved back to Pakistan was reach out to the new Chief Minister. In 2021, the face-to-face meeting I had with Jam Kamal was helpful, inspiring, and made me more curious about other parts of Balochistan I wouldn’t have heard about otherwise. He introduced me to the tribal leaders of Jhal Magsi. He even helped facilitate a historic tour of Bela City to ancient or historic sites normally locked up. That meeting was a gift I can never repay.
Hoping to explain my goal of uplifting Balochistan’s image worldwide (and request the needed funding), I asked for a face-to-face with CM Bugti. We had been in touch during the 2022 floods when he was Governor and I made a flood awareness video. CM Bugti remembered me and kindly replied but after months and months of trying to set a meeting with him, I finally gave up.
I know he’s a busy man so during that time, I would also try to get on the calendar via his secretary Khalid (again, no idea his surname). The secretary was mostly professional. Then on May 18, 2024 he called me – he was smarter than Jam Kamal’s guy not putting his bad behaviour in writing – and said I’ll get the appointment with CM Bugti if Khalid comes to my apartment alone, and with only me there. I blocked him on WhatsApp. He tried calling the next night at 3am to my mobile number and I didn’t pick up.
I immediately informed CM Bugti, assuming he’d take it seriously like JK did but no. I shared the 3am call as well. Nothing ever happened, as confirmed by another staffer working with Khalid.
The one thing that did happen was that in June, Khalid started a smear campaign against me to other team members who knew me. He found out I had complained and tried to get ahead of it, sharing I was a bad person and not to be trusted. The same trusted advisor, who has first-hand knowledge of the alleged rapist, informed me. I shared this to the CM but never heard back.
ATTEMPTED RAPE
UPDATE 21 JULY 2025. I’ve read a few mentions on X/Twitter today referencing that CM Bugti’s office has yet to comment but that they acknowledged my formal complaint filed on 20 June 2025. To protect myself in this regard, I am sharing the FORMAL COMPLAINT I filed (with some redactions to protect names and one sensitive topic unrelated to the attempt to rape me, from 4 months after). Additionally, I am sharing the OFFICIAL RESPONSE received 15 July 2025. You will see that the RESPONSE says, more or less, “No one by the name Shahnawaz Fawad Afridi works here.”
His victims are seeing my article and MESSAGING me.
UPDATE 16 JULY 2025
I’ve learned he has more than 1 type of victim but they are so terrified they won’t make police complaints:
1) It’s confirmed he is a pimp & trafficker
2) He runs romance scams and cons women for money (apparently going back as far as 15 years or possibly more!).
3) One of his victims was a married woman who became pregnant and had twins
On April 3, 2024, following a meeting with a Member of the Provincial Assembly of Balochistan, Farah Azeem Shah (MPA), I was sat working in the lobby of the Quetta Serena Hotel. Syed Shahnawaz / Shahnawaz Fawad Afridi came up and introduced himself as a Coordinator to CM Bugti, passing me his business card (see below). It turned out he was illegally / falsely using that card, as months later I discovered that he was Coordinator years ago, which you can see here in this article, when Bizenjo was Chief Minister (and when the MPA was Bizenjo’s spokesperson, so she’s been connected to Fawad for many years — an important fact for later in my story).
He asked why I was there and I told him about my PTDC-approved project. He told me something I will never forget: “I’m here to make money, I don’t care about anything else,” which was the OPPOSITE to what my feelings were. I wanted to help Baloch people in rural areas. I was spending my own money self-funding my company as I tried to secure funding for my project and build up my client base.
That afternoon he sent a video of himself with ex-CM Bizenjo in a private plane, shared pics of guns & alcohol, and we had a fun chat. I love cocktails so for me I felt he was someone I would get on with. He said he could help secure the funding but his CONDITION for helping me was that I never mention his name. But I didn’t know him or trust him so I asked 2 people I trusted at the time if they knew him, a male friend in government and the female MPA. My friend didn’t know him but said 100% don’t trust him and the MPA assured me “u r in safe hands with Fawad”. Then she contacted Fawad.
That night at 22:39 he messaged me saying he learned I asked the MPA about him, which he told me was forbidden. He said to never contact him again.
Please Note:
Fawad uses many names…
Criminals often use multiple names to conceal their identity and to make it difficult to track and find them. He also has almost zero presence on the Internet (only this article in the Quetta Voice). These are the variations of names I’ve seen / been told he goes by:
- Syed Shah Nawaz
- Syed Shahnawaz
- Shahnawaz Fahad Afridi
- Shahnawaz Fawad Afridi
- Fawad Syed Shahnawaz
In May, the MPA agreed to fund my project through her budget. For two months she promised that the funds were coming “next week, dear” but eventually I realised the funding was never real.
On July 13, 2024, I contacted Fawad, still believing he was CM Bugti’s Coordinator and could help greenlight my project. He asked how much money I had in the bank and I told him (not a lot), so he said he was going to send his secretary to drop off an envelope so I’d have some cash “just in case.” I assumed it was an advance payment from CM Bugti’s office or some other government entity. It was not.
Later I realised he was paying me as if I were a prostitute. I sent him my address at One Constitution Avenue in Islamabad and his secretary dropped off an envelope with Rs50,000 (US$175) at 5pm.
We agreed to have my pitch meeting at the Islamabad Serena Hotel lobby the next day but he called 2 hours later and said his plans had changed and he only had 5 minutes that evening so he would come hear my project pitch quickly. My business partner for the Balochistan tours was at my apartment for a meeting, which I told to Fawad. He said he didn’t have time for the formality of a group meeting and to ask him to leave so I did.
Syed Shahnawaz / Shahnawaz Fawad Afridi arrived at 20:56 and asked for a tour. In my bedroom he asked me to turn on AC, which I thought was strange and just said “no no, we’ll meet in my living room”. He instantly took my hand in his and said that he hoped I understood things work differently in Balochistan and that I needed a man to fund my life. I still stupidly thought I was there to pitch for funding and had my laptop. He suggested we go sit on my bed. Again, I said no. We sat on the sofa and he started kissing me.
I’ve never dealt with this before but now fully understand how women are blamed as being complicit. In that moment of shock and disbelief, it felt safest for me to give in a little and then move, sit away from him or stand with the ottoman between us. As weak as this sounds, I didn’t want to offend him or bruise his ego. I fully believed he was in a position of power with CM Bugti and I needed him to approve my project.
Then, it was a nightmare. Over the course of 35 minutes, he pinned me against a wall twice, exposed his penis and tried to push my head down onto it, he shoved his hand down my bra and cupped my breast, kissed me multiple times. At every moment, I pushed him off, distanced myself, tried to get back to showing my project presentation, and said NO.
NO NO NO over and over again.
When I finally got him out the door, he put his shoe in the door frame to stop it from closing and pushed back in. That was the first time I went from being very annoyed to being TERRIFIED AND SCARED.
After he left I made 2 calls: to a trusted friend in Pakistan and then to my mother for 3 hours. She was so upset to hear what had happened in my pursuit of getting that project funded that she offered to fund it for Balochistan (which of course a foreigner couldn’t do but was sweet nonetheless)!
He dangled the funding for my passion project over my head, asking me a few hours after the attack to send the financials from my project. I played nice, still in shock but also trying to not hurt his ego or make an enemy. I still fully believed he could fund my project. I told him how he made me feel, like a prostitute and cheap. I received this admission of guilt from him that acknowledges the attempted rape: “I obey what u said yesterday I didn’t fuck u” (14 July 2024, 23:45).
What I need to share now is shameful for me but it is the truth and Fawad has already tried to use this against me with the female MPA. I prefer to share it myself. When I first met him, I liked how cocky and confident he was, that’s very much my type. He also had a way about him, like a snake charmer. But anyone who knows me or has worked with me knows I don’t mix business and pleasure. I’ve seen how that turns out and it never ends well, especially for women. So I was never going to do anything unprofessional if we were actively working together.
In the months that followed he gaslit me, convinced me I misunderstood his advances. He pursued me … even stalked me to Toni&Guy Islamabad once when I was having my hair done. The team at Toni&Guy believed him to be a high ranking police officer (can anyone find out if that’s even remotely true?).
I told him I needed time to get over the shock (“give me a few months” I would say), but I could imagine meeting up with him again, just in public. Over months, he messaged and called dozens and dozens of times asking to get together.
The only time I met Syed Shahnawaz / Shahnawaz Fawad Afridi again was August 31st. He said he had a serious project he wanted me to work on at RIMS HOSPITAL INTERNATIONAL (Jinnah Road, Blue Area Islamabad). I thought they were looking for a brand manager. They weren’t and it wasn’t a project, he lied. In a boardroom, he tried to impress me by having me meet the top physicians and hospital administrators – and I quickly learned they thought I was going to be an investor. All lies. I never saw him face-to-face again.
When he learned I filed a formal complaint to the CM’s office on 20 June 2025, Fawad shared messages from me from 4 months after the attack to the MPA, pretending they were from before the attack. He also lied to her & she believed him (like I sent nudes, which I’ve never done). Then he started sharing misleading messages. Things that only makes sense if you read the messages above and below because of my particular brand of sarcasm. Because of that, over a couple of weeks, the MPA told me I “asked for it” and I should be ashamed of myself and that I wasn’t a victim. She said I “should be ashamed accusing an innocent man”.
Eventually I blocked him on WhatsApp. I’m grateful every day for my therapist Sam who helped me get over that. He has a sort of snake-charmer way about him and the idea of being attracted to a man who had tried to rape me was a struggle to deal with.
Since filing the complaint with the CM’s office, Fawad has done two things to scare and silence me:
- On July 3, 2025, Syed Shahnawaz / Shahnawaz Fawad Afridi emailed a falsified cease and desist order (click that link to read it, it’s hilarious). It was sent by a made-up/fake Pakistani lawyer, with Fawad’s official email from his business card cc’d. He threatened me to stay quiet, demanded an apology, and said that if I continued he’d sue me for around US$150,000.
- On July 12, 2025, he pretended to be the brother of a rape victim on Facebook, asking for help to get justice for his sister. I realised quickly it was Fawad when he wrote, “did you know you have 2 warrants for your arrest with the Quetta police by a secretary at BBoIT and some guy named Afridi”? The moment he typed that I blocked the account.
I sent screenshots of the chat to the Home Department, they confirmed it was fake.
Syed Shahnawaz / Shahnawaz Fawad Afridi has never had his photo on the Internet so one thing I am proud about, beyond exposing him as a criminal, is that his name and photo are forever out there. Google doesn’t forget and I have posted his photo and all versions of his name on social media. I hope this follows him and protects women in the future who can now “google him” and find this. Although knowing men like this, he’ll change his name … so the cycle of abuse will never end unless the police and government step in now and do a proper investigation (which I’ve asked for…).
If you or anyone you know has been hurt by this or any other man, please go to the homepage and read how to safely file a report with the Women Police Station officers in your city.
ABUSE OF POWER by BBoIT CEO
UPDATE 17 JULY 2025: Kabeer informed me this morning that “Nothing of this sort what you wrote happened in 24/25”, which is what he must be sharing to everyone in his world. Please know that every word below is true & i have screengrabs of each time he asked to visit me in 2024, chat backups, dates & times & screengrabs of every excuse the staff told me, etc.
Men do not get to gaslight & blame the woman to re-write history.
I honestly believe he sees his truth that way … based on decades of being conditioned that it’s a man’s world. But that doesn’t make it fact.
This part of my story breaks my heart. I lived in Pakistan for 364 days from November 2020 to November 2021, and half of that time there was someone special in my life. I have been divorced for decades and rarely date but I did a bit in Pakistan with one man, ex-Gwadar Deputy Commissioner Abdul Kabeer Zarkoon. We met up in a few cities. When I was in Gwadar, where we met, I would also sit in and consult on website and app projects with his team, which is a specialty of mine. I was only travelling, not working in Pakistan, so it broke no rules for me.
We stayed in touch and had a nice friendship in the years that followed. When I moved back, because Kabeer still worked in government, I made a choice not to see him. He’d ask to meet up or come around when he was in Islamabad or if we coincided in Quetta (as he was working in Islamabad until Nov 24). But I know how that goes for women doing business anywhere in the world – let alone in a deeply patriarchal society like Pakistan. I stayed friendly but just friends and never met up.
After 9 months, the dream of having my passion project funded had died. It needed to be funded by a governmental department in Balochistan because I’d need an official balochistan.gov.pk domain for the new Balochistan Tourism website (not a .com or .org) … and I tried HARD for months and months but no one in Balochistan government saw value in the project. The Baloch people deserve tourism love like the rest of Pakistan, and for their economies to be uplifted, especially in rural areas. I will always feel I failed when it comes to this project.
Then, mid-January, I learned the best news! My sweet friend, who I still had a good friendships with, was now CEO of Balochistan’s inbound investment arm. Although my project focussed on Balochistan’s tourism brand image, the department in government that would benefit the most from an improved image of Balochistan would be BBoIT (Balochistan Board of Investment Trade).
I reached out to him and asked for a quick 5-minute call. They normally don’t “fund” but are the ones accepting the inbound funding so my request needed to be explained. Since Kabeer already knew about my passion project, I thought it would be an easy pitch and he’d instantly see value in it (he’s one of the few people I trusted to send my project to in 2024, confirmed here in our WhatsApp history).
Kabeer never replied. Over three weeks, I tried to WhatsApp, then email, then I thought maybe he wasn’t receiving my messages – because it never crossed my mind he was blacklisting me from a meeting – so I tried his secretary and Instagram. Eventually they told me that Kabeer was receiving everything but informing them to make excuses.
I know I can never return to Pakistan because I’ve outed Fawad. So this is for the Baloch people, please see what was approved for you. A lot needs to change for human rights but rural areas also deserve tourism like the rest of Pakistan.
CLICK HERE TO SEE MY PASSION PROJECT (created by me, approved by PTDC).
I’m adding this just for fun. BBoIT’s HR Manager was somehow appointed to deal with me. The best excuse he gave me was that Mr. Kabeer wasn’t available for the next 2 months as he was out of reach. I asked if he left the country and he said no … he was at a conference in Lahore! I am still laughing as I type that.
It hurt to learn that the person who made me happiest in 2021 was intentionally blocking my calls out of pettiness, without regard for the good of the Balochistan people or the office he now presides over as CEO.
That finally broke my spirit.
After everything else that happened trying to secure funding for an already-approved project, the fact that HE would do that to me was an interesting bookend to my failure.
I decided that day to move out of Pakistan.
We WhatsApp’d recently because I wanted Kabeer to know I was writing this. More importantly, I wanted to understand why he chose to blacklist me when nothing about our past professional relationship warranted it. I’m paraphrasing (cutting out a bunch) but he basically replied, “That’s my fault. Since you and I had stopped having sex, I couldn’t face you. The situation was not handled well by the staff.“
If I was a man or any other foreign woman asking for 5-minutes with the CEO, I would have been given the meeting. I also fully believe that if I had continued our romance like in 2021, back when I used to attend meetings in Gwadar with his I.T. team, that I would have been afforded the professional courtesy in 2025 of Kabeer picking up my call.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I still find Pakistan one of the safest countries I’ve ever travelled to and with the most hospitable people. And while I would love to live in Pakistan and work in Balochistan again, my strategy for business would change. Starting with the fact that I would absolutely have a male assistant to act as both gatekeeper to my initial engagement with people but also to just get things done faster and without … all of the above.