SRINAGAR - A soldier armed with two automatic weapons shot dead five of his colleagues as they slept early Thursday before killing himself in Indian-held Kashmir.
The soldier, who was on night duty, walked into the barracks where the soldiers were resting and opened fire at a military camp 20 kilometres north of Srinagar. “The soldier ran amok, killing five others before shooting himself dead in the camp in Ganderbal district,” Indian army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Narinder Nahar Joshi told AFP. Another soldier who was injured in the attack recalled the events to police before being shifted to a military hospital in Srinagar for treatment, local superintendent of police Shahid Mehraj told AFP.
A military inquiry and a separate police probe were under way to determine what sparked the incident at the camp in Safapora village, including whether the soldier was suffering from stress. “We don’t know what triggered this incident, but we are investigating thoroughly so that such an incident is not repeated in future,” Mehraj said, adding police have seized two automatic rifles used by the soldier. “We are also talking to soldiers who were awake at the time of shooting,” Mehraj said.
The killer was a member of a counter-insurgency force called the Rashtriya Rifles posted to the heavily militarised Himalayan region and charged with tracking down suspected militants. Several similar incidents have occurred in the past in the region, including one in 2011 when an Indian soldier killed four of his comrades after an altercation in a camp in Anantnag district. Although reasons for the shootings are not yet known, a defence expert said such soldiers, already working in a tense and hostile environment, are sometimes also badly managed by their superiors.
They can be denied leave for long periods, increasing resentment and piling on the pressure, Ajay Sahni, who heads the non-governmental Institute of Conflict Management in Delhi, told AFP.
The Rashtriya Rifles is made up of tens of thousands of soldiers drawn from the ranks of the army. Their personnel are shifted from one internal conflict to another.
“Bad leadership and poor management of leave, combined with protraction of duties under relentless stress, cause such fratricidal incidents,” Sahni said. Sahni said the defence hierarchy has conducted many studies to try to better understand what leads to such incidents, although these have not been publicly released.
In recent years the Indian army has tried to help soldiers deal with stress, including setting up helplines and yoga classes and distributing booklets on signs of the condition.
Such incidents have also been reported from India’s insurgency-racked northeast, with a soldier gunning down six of his comrades in restive Manipur state in 2009.