The about-50-acre sprawling army base at Punjab’s Bathinda witnessed death for the second time in a single day with the body of a soldier being found within the premises with a fatal gunshot wound.
An Army statement on Thursday morning alluded towards a suicide. “A soldier died of a gunshot wound at approximately 4:30 PM on 12 April 2023 at Bathinda Military Station… The case purportedly seems to be of attempted suicide.”
The statement said that the soldier, who had returned from leave on Tuesday, was on sentry duty with his service weapon and that the weapon and cartridge case from the same weapon was found next to the soldier.
“There is ‘No’ connection whatsoever with the incident that took place at 04:30 AM at Bathinda Military Station,” it added.
About 12 hours earlier, at about 4.30 am, according to a Punjab Police FIR, two white kurta-clad masked individuals were seen with an INSAS rifle and an axe, running towards the forested area inside the military campus after sounds of gunfire inside two rooms in the Officers’ Mess area.
While the blood-splattered bodies of four soldiers—all from the 80 Medium artillery regiment unit—were recovered in the two rooms, no one has been reported to have been apprehended even after the entire cantonment was sealed off almost immediately by the Army’s Quick Reaction Teams.
Interestingly, the soldier who allegedly committed suicide on Wednesday afternoon, was also from the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (SATA) of the artillery.
Besides an ammunition dump, the Bathinda base is home to a Corps HQ and other units from the infantry, artillery, armoured regiments, corps of engineers, Signals, etc.
Even as a lot of key questions about the first shootout remained unanswered, a joint Army-Punjab Police team is probing the incident.
The deaths inside the army camp come at a time when Sikh separatist elements in Punjab and elsewhere are trying to revive the movement for ‘Khalistan’ or a separate homeland for the Sikhs.
The authorities have already launched a crackdown by arresting hundreds of separatists putting them behind bars including some leaders who have been jailed in a high-security prison in Assam’s Dibrugarh.