The rare incident involves the army’s 48 Rashtriya Rifles unit and took place in Rajouri’s Thanamandi area.
An army Major opened fire and lobbed grenades at his fellow soldiers at a forward base near the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday, resulting in injuries to a few of them, four officials aware of the matter said.
The rare incident involves the Indian Army’s 48 Rashtriya Rifles unit and took place in Rajouri’s Thanamandi area. There are no reports of casualties and the Major has been apprehended, the officials said, asking not to be named.
Details of the incident were sketchy till the time this report was filed on Thursday night, and there was no official word from the army either in Delhi or Jammu. The officer responsible for the unfortunate incident was dealing with some personal issues, the officials said. The injured soldiers were rushed to hospital.
The Major is believed to have fired in the air before he began shooting at some soldiers of the unit, which specialises in counter-terrorism operations, said one of the officials cited above. A few officers, including the regimental medical officer, rushed to the spot after the firing began, and they were targeted by the major with grenades, said a second official.
The Jammu region has witnessed two major terror attacks this year. Five soldiers were killed and an officer wounded in a terror ambush in Rajouri’s Kandi forest area in May, with the attack suspected to have been carried out by the same group of terrorists who had ambushed an army truck and killed five soldiers in Poonch in April.
The Thanamandi incident comes six months after four soldiers were killed in a fratricide attack at an officers’ mess in the Bathinda military station in Punjab.
