Srinagar ,March 4: An Army officer and two militants were killed and three soldiers and a policeman wounded in a renewed gunfight at Dadasar, outside the Kashmiri town of Tral about 40 km south of capital Srinagar, raising the toll to five. Two militants were killed earlier on Wednesday when the encounter started.
This was the second major operation in eight days launched jointly by the Army’s Rashtriya Rifles, the CRPF and local police’s counter-insurgency Special Operations Group (SOG) against militants in the Valley.
Captain Deepak Sharma is the second Army officer to sacrifice his life fighting militants. On February 24, Captain Devinder Singh Jass was killed in a similar gun battle in Sopore, 48 km northwest of Srinagar.
The defence spokesperson, Lt. Col. J.S. Brar, confirming the killing of the Rashtriya Rifles officer in the latest encounter, said, “The Army lost gallant officer Capt. Deepak Sharma in the encounter. He was martyred after killing two terrorists in a fierce gunfight in a densely-populated and heavily built-up area.” Capt Sharma, a resident of Bharat Colony, Model Town, Rohtak, was commissioned in the Corps of Signals in September 2006, the spokesperson added.
The four militants claimed to have been killed in the 30-hour gunfight at Dadasar belonged to the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, a frontline indigenous militant group. Lt. Col. Brar also claimed that three of them were “top commanders” of the Hizb active in South Kashmir for the past 15 years.
The fighting broke out early Wednesday when militants hiding in a cluster of houses fired at a joint search party in Mir Mohalla locality of Dadasar. Police officials in Srinagar said the cordon-and-search operation was mounted after they received a tip-off about the presence of Hizb militants in the village.
After a night-long lull, the gunfight between the holed-up militants and security forces restarted on Thursday morning, said officials. The security forces, according to the latest reports from Tral, were now searching the debris of three residential houses razed during the gunfight. “The bodies of the militants have not been retrieved as yet,” said a police official over the phone from Tral.
Officials had on Wednesday claimed that the militants were earlier asked to surrender but they responded by shooting at the approaching security forces. “After evacuating the civilian population from the area, the security forces launched the operation to flush out the militants dead or alive,” said police official Farooq Ahmed. According to him, after a few hours of quiet, security forces again came under heavy automatic gunfire on Thursday.
Yusuf Jameel