A Junior Commissioned Officer (JCO) of the Army’s special forces laid down his life on Sunday, while three more soldiers were injured in a gunfight with terrorists in a remote forest area in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kishtwar district, officials said.
The operation comes amid an intensified hunt underway since the killing of two Village Defence Guards (VDGs) recently.
The Army identified the fallen hero as Naib Subedar Rakesh Kumar of 2 Para and saluted his supreme sacrifice.
The encounter broke out around 11 am when joint search parties of the Army and police intercepted the terrorists in the Keshwan forest, a few kilometres from the spot where the bullet-riddled bodies of VDGs Nazir Ahmad and Kuldeep Kumar were found.