A senior journalist of a local newspaper has been killed by unknown assailants in the Haripur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on Sunday, police told Dawn.

Baksheesh Allai ─ the bureau chief of The K2 Times ─ was on his way home when motorcyclists intercepted him on a main road and spread him with bullets, successfully fleeing the scene in its aftermath.

“We see this murder of a local journalist as an act of a high profile target killing and the assailants will soon be arrested,” Shahzad Nadeem Bukhari the district police office Haripur told reporters.

Mohammad Arshad, the brother of the slain journalist filed an FIR against unknown assailants, stating that Baksheesh Allai and his entire family had no enmities.

The journalist’s fraternity placed the body of the victim at Panian square at GT road and blocked it to all sort of traffic for many hours demanding the killers' arrests.

Shahid Chaudhry, the president of the Abbottabad Press Club and ex-member of the executive body of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists led the protest.

The district police officer Shahzad Nadeem Bukhari held talks with protesting journalists and convinced them to end the protest.

“I assure you that we will arrest his [Allai's] killers without wasting any time as we are considering this is a high profile case of target killing,” said Bukhari.

Chaudhry asserted that the journalists’ fraternity across the Hazara region would observe protests and take out rallies to condemn the cold-blooded murder of their colleague on Monday.