Nick Penzenstadler

USA TODAY

Corrections & clarifications: The headline with this story has been updated to provide more context about the model's slaying.

Police say the brother of a social media celebrity in Pakistan confessed to killing her after she stirred controversy by posting racy photos and posing with a prominent Muslim cleric, saying she had besmirched the family name.

Waseem Azeem, who was accompanied by police, confessed in a news conference on Saturday to drugging and strangling his sister, 26-year-old Qandeel Baloch. He said that through her risque videos and social media posts "she brought dishonour to the Baloch name," the local newspaper Dawn reported.

Baloch died Friday when one of her six brothers strangled her to death as she slept in the family’s home in the province of Punjab, police said.

“Apparently the lady died of suffocation, but final opinion on her death would be possible only after report of chemical examination comes,” said Mushtaq Ahmed, who was among the team that conducted Baloch’s autopsy. “She might have been given some poisonous substance before being strangled.”

Multan police chief Akram Azhar said authorities will charge Azeem with carrying out an "honor killing." They will seek the “maximum punishment,” he added.

Murder carries a potential death sentence, and the honor killing charge will make Azeem ineligible for a family pardon.

Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, shot to fame and notoriety with a series of social media postings that would be tame by Western standards but were deeply scandalous by conservative Pakistani societal norms. She cultivated an outrageous public persona, recently promising to perform a public striptease if the Pakistani cricket team won a major tournament.

Baloch had a large following of more than 700,000 people on her official Facebook page. She posted recently she was “trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people who don’t wanna come out of their shells of false beliefs and old practices.”

Her Twitter account, with 41,000 followers, was active as of Friday morning, the day she was killed.

Most recently, Baloch became embroiled in public scandal when she posted selfies with Mufti Adbul Qavi, a prominent cleric, in a Karachi hotel room during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan. In one picture, she is wearing the cleric’s trademark fur-lined hat.

Following a string of racy video posts and controversies, Baloch started receiving death threats and requested security from the government, the English-language daily newspaper The Express Tribune reported.

Qavi maintained that he only met with her to discuss the teachings of Islam. But the government suspended Qavi and removed him from the official moon-sighting committee that determines when Ramadan starts and ends in accordance with the Islamic lunar calendar.

Condemnations from prominent politicians and filmmakers streamed online Saturday.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party, said government leaders recently failed to pass legislation aimed at curbing so-called honor killings that claim the lives of hundreds of women each year.

Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy also spoke out. Her documentary A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness won an Oscar earlier this year.

"I really feel that no woman is safe in this country, until we start making examples of people, until we start sending men who kill women to jail, unless we literally say there will be no more killing and those who dare will spend the rest of their lives behind bars," she told the AFP news agency.

Contributing: The Associated Press