Unidentified assailants shot Haq as he was leaving the Khuzdar Press Club in the city of Khuzdar in Baluchistan province. Haq was the secretary-general of the press club and a longtime local correspondent for ARY Television.
ARY Television said it was not aware of any threats directed at Haq. But Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist, wrote after Haq's death that the journalist had been threatened by the Baluch Musalah Diffa Army (BMDA, or the Armed Baluch Defense) in November 2011 and had subsequently been named on a hit list issued by a BMDA spokesman.
Tensions with the press had escalated after the Baluchistan High Court barred news coverage of banned groups in October 2011. Several of the banned groups began threatening local journalists for not reporting on their militant operations.
Haq's family declined to discuss widespread assertions by his colleagues that he had been killed because security forces were angry that he was working with the families of missing Baluchis on presenting cases before the Quetta bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. At the time of Haq's death, the court was hearing more than 100 missing-person cases in Baluchistan. Of those cases, 19 were from Khuzdar.