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.