Two missing Special Police Officers found shot dead in Kishtwar, service rifles gone

The bodies of two Special Police Officers (SPOs) who went missing in the hills of Kishtwar district were found with bullet wounds on the morning of Thursday, November 12, 2026, in the Dachhan area of Jammu and Kashmir. Their service rifles were not at the spot.

The dead are Babi Chand, 57, and Rashpal Kumar, 45. Both were attached to the J&K Police Special Operations Group (SOG) and lived at Kiyar village in Dachhan, where they were posted. Kishtwar MLA Shagun Parihar said the bodies were recovered at about 8 am and 9 am.

What happened on Wednesday

The two men left their camp at Kiyar on Wednesday, November 11, on foot through forest. They were to reach an Army post and relieve personnel of the 17 Rashtriya Rifles at a temporary base. Reports differ on the exact base: some name Dharna-Marwah, one names Basnan in Inderwal. They never got there.

Their phones were reachable at first and then switched off.

Police, the Army and the CRPF began a joint search that night. Drones and sniffer dogs were used across forested, steep ground. The search ended the next morning when the bodies were found. A cordon has since been thrown around the area to trace the people responsible, and a manhunt has been launched.

What officials have and have not said

Both men had bullet wounds, including on the head, according to the reports. Security officials confirmed that their service rifles were missing, and that absence is the main reason investigators are treating a militant angle as a line of inquiry. No authority has named an attacker or a group, and the circumstances of the killings have not been formally established.

No official statement from J&K Police or the Army giving the cause of death or the state of the search was available at the time of writing.

Reaction

Parihar, a BJP legislator, called the killings tragic and urged Union Home Minister Amit Shah to ensure those responsible are held to account quickly. She blamed Pakistan, saying it “continues to persist with its nefarious conspiracies”, and called for a response four times as heavy as the loss.

Hers is the only on-record political reaction found so far.

How the district has fared

Kishtwar, in the Chenab valley, has dense forest and little mobile connectivity, which makes patrols slow and searches long. Counter-insurgency operations in recent years have weakened the militant networks there, but the district has not been free of violence. Reported deaths in terror-related incidents in Kishtwar were five in 2026 before these killings, four of them militants and one a soldier, against four in 2025 and five in 2024, when three security personnel and two civilians died.

On October 4, Deputy Commissioner Pankaj Kumar Sharma asked residents of Marwah, Warwan and Dachhan to share information about the movement of suspected militants, saying militancy stood in the way of tourism and development in the area.

The killings came hours after unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle fired at a CRPF checkpost in Kulgam, wounding three personnel. We reported on that attack here. Nothing in the reports links the two incidents, and they took place in different divisions of the Union Territory, but together they have raised security concerns across the region. Our earlier report on the IGP’s winter security review is here.

Why it matters

SPOs work with police units in remote areas and, as these two did, travel between camps and Army bases. Two men killed on a routine walk between posts, and two service rifles now in unknown hands, raise questions about how such movements are secured. Missing weapons also carry their own risk: they can be used again in later attacks.

What happens next

Security forces will continue the cordon and search in the Dachhan forests, and the investigation will have to establish what happened and trace the rifles. No date has been announced for any official statement or for a review of how SPOs move between posts in Kishtwar.