Indian soldier commits suicide in Srinagar

SRINAGAR: A Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in Kashmir committed suicide in Srinagar late night on Saturday, ARY News learnt.

The soldier, identified as Mukesh Bhawuk, injured two of his fellow soldiers inside their camp at Pantha Chowk area of Srinagar before shooting himself dead.

A force official on the condition of anonymity told the Kashmir Media Service (KMS) that two CRPF men entered into a verbal spat over a “service and promotion issue” at the camp housing 29 battalion of CRPF at Pantha Chowk.

“After a heated exchange of words, one of them injured two of his colleagues by firing from his service rifle. One of the injured people was the among the two involved in the argument”, said the official.

The shooter later shot him dead from his weapon whereas the injured personnel were shifted to a nearby medical facility for further treatment.

With a strength of over 300,000 personnel, the CRPF is India’s largest paramilitary force and is involved in grave human rights violations against the people of India-occupied Kashmir.

Read: A timeline of Indian atrocities in Kashmir in the year 2018

The incident, however, is not the first of its kind. Several Indian soldiers have committed suicide in the occupied valley due to numerous reasons. Independent observers term prolonged conflict and threat from the Kashmiri freedom fighters as a source of anxiety for the occupant Indian soldiers.

A Times of India (TOI) report in 2017 revealed that every year, 120 personnel of different branches of Indian military take their own lives, which is one of the biggest reasons for deaths in the Indian armed forces.

In total, the TOI report says, 1600 military personnel die every year without going to a battleground. The primary contributors in these deaths are road accidents and suicides.

The latest incident has raised the number of such deaths among Indian troops and police personnel in occupied Kashmir to 418 since January 2007 till date.