Unprovoked Pakistani firing killed two Indian soldiers and wounded four people, including a Border Security Force (BSF) officer and a woman, along the border in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district on Saturday night and early Sunday.
The Pakistani army fired at Indian posts and frontier villages to help militants cross the heavily-guarded Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border between the two nations. But Indian troops foiled attempts to push militants, the BSF said.
“Our troops observed suspicious movement and challenged the militants who had sneaked into the Krishna Ghati sector on Saturday night. They fired at the soldiers while trying to cross over to the Pakistan side,” an army officer said.
Bullets fatally hit a 23-year-old sepoy, Gursewak Singh, of 22 Sikh Regiment and he died of his wounds.
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Singh of Warana village in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district was to get married February next year. He is survived by parents and an elder brother. The body will be brought to Amritsar for the funeral at his village on Monday.
{{/usCountry}}Singh of Warana village in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district was to get married February next year. He is survived by parents and an elder brother. The body will be brought to Amritsar for the funeral at his village on Monday.
{{/usCountry}}The second soldier to die was Tukpare Rajendra Narayan, a native of Maharashtra’s Kolhapur. He died of shrapnel wounds as Pakistanis fired 120mm and 82mm mortar shells in the Poonch sector.
At least 20 people, including children, have been killed in more than a fortnight since Pakistan started pounding border villages with mortar shells and heavy machine gun fire, betraying a ceasefire agreement between the two neighbours. There was brief lull of four days, but the Pakistanis resuming firing again on Saturday night.
BSF sub-inspector Nitin Kumar, two army soldiers and a 29-year-old woman, Tasleema Akhter, were wounded in the attack in Poonch.
Border skirmishes escalated after Indian forces destroyed militant hideouts in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on September 28. Pakistan too suffered fatalities in Indian retaliatory fire.