Jawan, militant die in LoC encounter, search operations on

A militant and an Army jawan were killed and five soldiers including a Major were wounded in a gun battle in Macheal area close to the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kupwara district overnight, officials here said on Wednesday.

Reports stated that the Army’s 56 Rashtriya Rifles, along with PARA commandos, launched a massive search operation in the area following reports that a group of militants had recently infiltrated into Kupwara from PoK.

On Tuesday night, the troops came in contact with a group of militants along Jat Gali (pass) of Macheal and in the ensuing encounter one militant and a soldier were killed.

An Army Major and four jawans were injured, one of them critically. They were later airlifted to Srinagar where they have been admitted to 92 Base Hospital in Badamibagh Cantonment. The slain soldier has been identified as 56 Rashtriya Rifles’ Signalman Ajay Chaudhary. The injured in the encounter are Sepoys Lakshman Das, Nikhil Ghaur, Nitesh Kumar and Suraj. Sources said that the Major, who has not been named, received a minor injury.

The identity of the slain militant is yet to be ascertained as the operation was continuing when reports last came in.

Meanwhile, two shopkeepers were injured in two grenade blasts that took place in quick succession in Shopian town of south Kashmir on Wednesday. One of the grenades was hurled by suspected militants at a local police station without causing any damage.

The other exploded in the town’s Batora Chowk, injuring two shop owners, reports said. The area was quickly sealed by police to launch investigations.

In Srinagar on Wednesday, hundreds of mourners attended the funeral of Sheikh Tanveer Sultan, a 32-year-old man from the City’s Bemina area who was shot dead by security forces in the highway town of Kud, 194-km south of the restive region’s main town earlier in the week.

Officials claimed that he was shot by cops in retaliation as he opened fire on them at a makeshift check-point at Kud along the Srinagar-Jammu highway on Wednesday. A woman resident was killed and two other civilians were injured in the reported shootout.

The slain man’s family, however, said that Sultan was mentally ill and that he was travelling in a public bus to relocate to Amritsar for treatment. They said he was killed in cold blood by policemen on the way.

Sultan’s killing sparked off widespread protests for the second consecutive day on Wednesday in Srinagar while some masked youth in his funeral procession waved Islamic State flags and that of Pakistan amid shouts of ‘We want freedom”.

Earlier police took separatist leaders and activists into preventive custody or placed them under house arrest to prevent them from participating in a planned silent protest against the government’s proposal to set up separate clusters for displaced Kashmiri Pandits and a Sianik colony for former and serving soldiers of the Army and their families in Srinagar and elsewhere in the Valley.

Pro-independence Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leader Mr Muhammad Yasin Malik was once again arrested from his Maisuma residence shortly after dawn. He has been lodged at City’s Kothi Bagh Police Station. Mr Malik has faced repeated arrests after he started a unification move in the separatist camp. Dozens of other leaders and activists of all factions of Hurriyat Conference were also placed under house arrest or detained at police stations. Among them was Kashmir’s chief Muslim cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.

Senior separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani meanwhile has been under house arrest for the past several months.