An Army major killed in gun battle erupted between militants and army personnel in Jammu & Kashmir on Friday. Militants suddenly opened fired on the army team when it was on search operation in the village near Pattan, 45 km from Srinagar in Baramulla district of northern Kashmir. In the exchange of firing Major Verinder Singh received a critical head injury and immediately sent to hospital but he died just after reaching to the hospital.

According to the report, the gun battle had started on late Tuesday at Saidpora village near Pattan when personnel of 29 Rashtriya Rifles (RR) and the Special Operations Group (SOG) of the state police, after receiving specific information about the hideouts of militants in the village house, surrounded a house.

Later, Police said, exchange of heavy fire continued for four days at Saidpora. On Friday morning, militants opened heavy fire on the troops conducting searches in the village and killed the army Major in the gun battle.

A Police officer said:

The state police so far killed three terrorists in the gunfight but three Army men were also killed on Tuesday, first day of operation, four others were wounded on Friday morning.

In the over 50-hour long gunfight, that had started on Tuesday evening at Pattan, more than 10 houses were completely gutted. Defence spokesman Col Manjinder Singh said that they recovered the body of one more militant on Thursday. He confirmed the number of militants killed in the encounter to be two and three army jawans also sacrificed their lives in the fight.

According to another report, army personnel were engaged in another gunfight with hiding militants in the nearby Sopore town in the same district. The militants, said to be, the guerrillas of Lashkar-e-Taiba, were holed up in a hotel building and the security forces covered them in an overnight gunfight.

An SOG cop was critically injured in the gunfight near the hotel and he was rushed to hospital. Earlier, the LeT guerrillas attacked the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) patrol and holed up in the hotel building on Thursday afternoon. It created high tension in Sopore, well known as Kashmir’s apple town.

Sopore Additional Superintendent of Police Mir Imtiyaz said that the police rescued around four hundred people safely who were holed up in the same building. Later, LeT spokesman, Dr Abdullah Gaznavi, told a news agency that four LeT cadres had attacked the CRPF camp and had killed five CRPF men.