Indian soldier kills officer in Kashmir camp
Source: Reuters
SRINAGAR, India, Oct 31 (Reuters) - An Indian soldier shot an officer dead at an army camp in Kashmir on Tuesday in the fourth such fatal shooting in a little over a week, an army spokesman said. Despite a decline in separatist violence in the state, psychiatrists says stress levels are high among the hundreds of thousands of Indian police and soldiers fighting Muslim militants in Kashmir. "A jawan (soldier) shot dead Lieutenant-Colonel Sakat Saxena before he was overpowered by his colleagues," army spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel A. K. Mathur said. "The army has ordered an inquiry." The shooting took place in the mountainous Harwan area on outskirts of Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital. Dozen of soldiers have been killed by their colleagues in Kashmir since a rebellion against Indian rule broke out in the Himalayan region in 1989. "I think they (soldiers) are not properly screened by psychiatrists at the time of induction in Kashmir and later deprived of stress-relieving therapies on a regular basis," said Syed Abinah Nawaz, a doctor at Kashmir's only psychiatric hospital. Indian authorities say they have introduced yoga sessions for soldiers and officers to combat the stress of facing danger on a daily basis, with troops often operating in difficult terrain and freezing temperatures.
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