An officer of the rank of major belonging to the Army’s 4 Rajput Battalion and four of his junior colleagues found involved in the April 30 staged gunfight near the Line of Control, in which three innocent Kashmiri youth were slain, are being brought here from their present deployment location in a couple of days to be handed over to the local police.

Army personnel averted a major tragedy in Turtuk area of Nubra valley close to the Line of Control (LoC) by evacuating school children trapped in a major landslide. The incident occurred on May 27 when the entire Ladakh region with Kashmir valley was experiencing heavy rains and snowfall in upper reaches.

Kashmiri separatist leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and several supporting activists have been placed under house arrest or detained in police lockups ahead of the anniversary of death of two Shopian women whose bodies were found in a mountain stream a day after they had disappeared while returning home from the family apple orchard on May 29 last year.

The riot police on Saturday fired teargas canisters and rifle shots in the air to break up protests by thousands of Kashmiri villagers during the funeral of three local men killed by the troops allegedly in a staged gunfight near the Line of Control earlier.

The Army is once again in the dock as the preliminary police investigations have proved involvement of its men in yet another incident of fake encounter killings near the Line of Control (LoC).

Pakistan-based Kashmiri militant alliance United Jihad Council (UJC) is ready to hold talks with the Centre but doesn’t think laying down arms should be made a precondition for the discourse. Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s latest conditional offer for talks has been welcomed by the ruling National Conference-Congress

The Opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) said on Wednesday that it has expelled one of its senior leaders, A.K. Sawhney, who was also the party’s spokesperson for indulging in an “indecent” act at a public rally in Jammu recently.

Indian troops shot dead two infiltrating militants near the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kupwara district on Wednesday, officials here said.
A defence spokesperson confirming it said here that the Army foiled an infiltration bid along the de facto border in Tangdhar sector, about 140-km northwest of h

A top Kashmiri businessman and president of traders’ federation of Sopore, the Valley’s main apple trading centre, Gulam Nabi Khan was shot dead by an unidentified assailant at the town’s main square

UPA chairperson and Congress president Sonia Gandhi will visit Jammu and Kashmir on May 29, ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s two-day tour of the state scheduled to begin on June 7.