Sabir Shakir: Biography, Career at ARY News, YouTube Channel, Exile and the 2026 Court Verdict

Who is Sabir Shakir?

Here is the simplest way to place him. For most of two decades Sabir Shakir was one of the reporters Pakistanis saw every evening on one of the country’s most watched news channels. He covered the capital: Parliament, the Prime Minister’s office, the army’s headquarters.

He was known for inside information. He would say what was being discussed behind closed doors, and often he was right. During the years of Imran Khan’s government his reporting was friendly to it, and his channel was the one most closely identified with that government.

When that government fell in April 2022, his world turned over. Within weeks he had left his job and his country. Since then he has been a voice on a screen, speaking from somewhere abroad to an audience of millions at home, while courts in Pakistan pile up cases against him.

Sabir Shakir’s story is the story of what happened to a certain kind of Pakistani journalism after 2022: pushed off television, driven abroad, bigger than ever online, and tried in an empty dock.

What we do not know

It is best to be clear at the start.

Readers often search for his age, his education, his family and his net worth. Websites offer confident answers to all four. Those answers are not sourced, and several contradict one another.

• Age. No reliable record of his date of birth was found.
• Education. Not on any reliable record found for this article.
• Net worth. Nobody outside his own household knows. Figures on the internet are invented. A YouTube channel’s income depends on views, on the countries the viewers are in and on whether the platform allows advertising on the videos. It cannot be worked out from the subscriber count.

We would sooner leave a blank than repeat a guess.

Why “net worth” figures are worthless

Since so many people search for this, here is how the numbers on such websites are made.

Someone takes a channel’s subscriber count, multiplies it by a guess at earnings per thousand views and publishes the result as a person’s wealth. Every step is unreliable.

A channel of his size very likely provides a good living. Beyond that, nobody outside his household can say, and anyone who offers a figure is guessing.

The ARY years

He joined ARY News in the mid-2000s, in the early days of private television news in Pakistan, and stayed for about seventeen years.

What he did there

• He reported from Islamabad, rising to lead the channel’s team in the capital.
• He was a regular on ARY’s evening panel programme, in which reporters, not politicians, discussed the day’s events.
• He became known for his sources in the security establishment and in the PTI.

A programme of reporters

The format that made him widely known was unusual for its time. Instead of politicians shouting across a table, a presenter sat with two or three senior reporters, who discussed what they had learned that day from their own sources.

It was cheap to make and popular. Viewers felt they were hearing what journalists said to one another after the microphones were off. Its weakness was the same as its appeal. Much of what was said rested on unnamed sources and could not be checked. A reporter with good access could inform the audience. He could also, knowingly or not, become a channel for whatever those sources wanted the public to believe.

That tension, between being well informed and being used, runs through his whole career, and through the careers of most reporters who cover the security establishment anywhere in the world.

ARY’s place in the media

To understand his career, it helps to know the channel.

That last line explains everything that followed. A channel that had been close to power was suddenly on the wrong side of it.

2022: off the air

Imran Khan was removed by a vote of no confidence on 10 April 2022. He blamed a foreign conspiracy and, in time, the army’s leadership. ARY gave his version wide coverage.

The consequences came quickly.

The killing of Arshad Sharif cast a long shadow. Kenyan police called it a case of mistaken identity. A Pakistani fact-finding team called it a planned killing. Nobody has been convicted. For the journalists who had left Pakistan in the same weeks, it was a warning of what exile might not protect them from.

Life as an online broadcaster

Cut off from television, he did what many of his colleagues did. He turned to YouTube.

His channel carries daily commentary on Pakistani politics: what the army chief is thinking, what will happen to Imran Khan, which judge will hear which case. It has grown very large. A press freedom group put it at about 2.8 million subscribers in January 2026.

Why exiled journalists do well online

The cost

There is a price, and he has spoken of it.

• He has said he moved from one country to another before settling, and that he does not reveal where he lives.
• He has reported receiving death threats.
• He told a press freedom group that his and his wife’s identity documents and bank accounts in Pakistan had been frozen.
• He cannot go home.

The cases against him

2023: terrorism investigations

On 9 May 2023 Imran Khan was arrested. Protesters attacked military buildings in several cities. The state’s response was the harshest in decades.

In June 2023 police in Islamabad opened criminal and terrorism investigations into him and several other journalists and commentators living abroad. The allegation was that, through videos and posts, they had encouraged the attacks.

The law used was the Anti-Terrorism Act, which carries the heaviest penalties in Pakistani law.

January 2026: the verdict

On 2 January 2026 an anti-terrorism court in Islamabad gave its judgment.

He rejects the verdict. He told a press freedom group that, before the judgment, people linked to the army had contacted him at least three times and offered to have the charges dropped if he stopped reporting critically. That is his account; no response from the authorities to it was found.

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the sentences and said Pakistan was stepping up the prosecution of journalists abroad. The government’s position is that incitement to attack state institutions is a crime whoever commits it and wherever he lives.

Trials in absence: how they work

Ordinary criminal courts in Pakistan do not usually convict an absent accused. The anti-terrorism law is an exception. Lawyers have long criticised that exception, since a trial without the accused cannot test the evidence properly.

Can he be brought back?

A sentence passed in Pakistan has no force in another country. To have him returned, Pakistan would have to ask for extradition.

• Britain has no general extradition treaty with Pakistan, though requests can be made case by case.
• A British court would ask whether the alleged conduct is a crime in Britain too, whether the request is politically motivated and whether the person would get a fair trial and humane treatment on return.
• Requests seen as aimed at journalists or political opponents rarely succeed.

In practice, then, the verdict’s main effects are inside Pakistan: his property and accounts can be seized, and he would be arrested if he returned.

Journalists abroad: a growing group

He is one of a number of well-known Pakistani journalists who have left since 2022.

Their critics call them propagandists who fled accountability and now make money by inflaming opinion from a safe distance. Their defenders call them the only people able to say what cannot be said inside the country.

What supporters and critics say

Supporters regard him as a reporter of long experience who refused to change his line when power changed hands, and who has paid for it with his job, his home and now a life sentence. Many trust his reading of events over anything on television.

Critics say he was never neutral: that for years he passed on the views of the powerful as news, and that his reporting served first the military leadership and then one political party. They say his online commentary is speculation presented as fact and that it has spread anger against state institutions. Some fellow journalists add that he was silent when colleagues on the other side were harassed under the government he supported.

Each view has merit. His journalism was partisan. But partisanship is not terrorism, and a system confident of its case would not need to try a man in an empty courtroom.

Words used in this article

Timeline: Sabir Shakir at a glance

Why his story matters

• It shows how fast a journalist’s position can change. In March 2022 he was among the best-connected reporters in the capital. By June he was abroad.
• It shows where Pakistan’s political conversation has moved. Much of it now happens on video platforms, led by people who cannot enter the country.
• It raises a hard question about free speech. Where is the line between fierce commentary and incitement, and who should draw it?

To understand the event that changed his life, read our explainer on the vote of no confidence and our plain-English guide to Pakistan’s politics.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Committee to Protect Journalists, “Harassed at home, convicted abroad: Pakistan steps up prosecution of overseas journalists” — January 2026.
• Committee to Protect Journalists, “Pakistani journalists abroad face terrorism investigations at home” — June 2023.
• JournalismPakistan, “Sabir Shakir resigns from ARY News after a 17-year stint” — May 2022.
• JournalismPakistan, “Mirpur Khas police register FIR against Sabir Shakir” — May 2022.
• JournalismPakistan, “Sabir Shakir’s YouTube channel hacked” — August 2022.
• JournalismPakistan, “Sabir Shakir receives death threats amid treason charges”
• Al Jazeera Journalism Review, “From TV Screens to YouTube: The Rise of Exiled Journalists in Pakistan”