SRINAGAR: A soldier of the Army’s Para (Special Forces) was killed and another wounded in a gunfight with separatist militants raging in woods of Jammu and Kashmir’s frontier district of Kupwara since Wednesday morning.
The slain soldier of 3 Para, the special force unit of the Army attached to the Parachute Regim-ent, has been identified as Sepoy Mukul Meena.
“He was critically injured during the firefight going on in Sadu Ganga forest area of Kupwara’s Kandi belt. He was evacuated to the nearest military hospital at Drugmulla, where doctors declared him brought dead,” said a police official. The condition of the injured soldier is stated to be stable.
Army sources said that intermittent exchange of fire took place at Sadu Ganga after the Army’s 47 Rashtriya Rifles confronted a group of militants hiding in the woods on Tuesday afternoon.
The standoff continued for some time, but militants managed to escape from the area on Tuesday evening.
However, the Army reinforcements, including Para commandos, laid sie-ge to a vast area around Sadu Ganga at dawn on Wednesday to launch a massive search operation for the militants.
In the afternoon, the fighting broke out again between the two sides, SSP (Kupwara) Ambarkar Shriram Dinkar said, adding that the exchanges were underway as the reports last came in from the area.
The militants, police sources said, have been surrounded from three sides and Army helicopters have been pressed into service for air surveillance and track down them. The sources said that the militants could be part of a fresh group of infiltrators as the area where gunfight is on falls in close proximity of the Line of Control (LoC).
