An Indian soldier has shot dead five of his colleagues before killing himself in Indian-administered Kashmir.
The incident took place on Wednesday night at a military camp about 20km north of the city of Srinagar.
Reports say soldiers stationed in the region often complain of long working hours, in poor conditions and with inadequate leave.
Authorities say since 2009 more soldiers and paramilitary troops have died in fratricidal killings and suicides than while fighting militants and rebels.
India’s armed forces, the world’s third largest, struggle to fill thousands of vacancies mainly due to difficult conditions and the high risks involved, according to the Defense Ministry.
“One of the Army men ran amok and fired indiscriminately at his colleagues inside an army camp at Safa Pora,” Army Spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel N N Joshi said of the incident in the early hours in the border state of Jammu and Kashmir.
“Five Army men died on the spot and one was injured. The Army man later shot himself dead using his service rifle,” Joshi said, adding that the Army has ordered an inquiry.
The shooting comes a day after India’s Navy Chief quit after taking responsibility for a string of operational incidents, the latest of which saw smoke sweep a submarine with two officers still missing. A dockside blast in Mumbai killed all 18 aboard another submarine in August.
There were 635 cases of suicide or attempted suicide in the armed forced from 2003 to 2007, all “attributable to increased stress environment leading to psychological imbalance in the soldiers”, a parliamentary committee said in a 2010 report.
