Colonel, Major, among 5 killed in Handwara battle
An Army Colonel who led from the front during a fierce and close range gunfight with militants in the woods of Handwara area in Jammu and Kashmir’s frontier Kupwara district on Saturday evening was along with four other security personnel under his command found dead early on Sunday.
The others who laid down their lives include an Army Major, two corporals and a sub-inspector of J&K police’s counterinsurgency Special Operation (SOG), the Army and police officials said here.
Two militants were earlier gunned down by the security forces and, according to Kashmir’s inspector-general of police Vijay Kumar, one of them was a top commander of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) from Pakistan. An Army jawan Shinbe Mangesh sustained injury in his right leg during the clash and was hospitalised.
The Army said that a family taken hostage by the militants during the operation was tactfully rescued and evacuated to safety by Colonel Ashutosh Sharma and his team before engaging them in the gunfight.
The authorities had suddenly lost contact with the joint team of the Army and J&K police during the cordon-and-search operation in Handwara’s Chanjimullah forest area.
Though the reinforcements including the Para Commandos of the highlytrained unit of Special Forces of the Army were rushed to Chanjimullah, they could not move into the ‘highly intricate area’ due to hostile weather and darkness, a report had said.
As the word spread on
Saturday night itself that all the five members of the team might have been killed, the Army here came out with a statement that the operation is in progress and, as a norm, the unit in contact “is not disturbed to give out breaking inputs”. It had also said that some media reports on the fate of the Colonel and the men under his command “are purely based on speculation”.
The police sources said that the guns had fallen silent on Saturday evening itself. At first light on Sunday, the troops on entering the enclosure where the fighting had taken place found the bullet-riddled corpses of Colonel Sharma and other team members Major Anuj Sood, Naik Rajesh and Lance Naik Dinesh and police subinspector Qazi S.A. Pathan strewn round.