2016 Nagrota Army Base Attack

On the morning of 29 November 2016, at around 5:30 local time, three militants identified as Numan, Aadil and Khalid, dressed in Indian police uniforms, attacked the Indian Army's 166 Field Regiment unit in Nagrota, a town near Jammu city in Jammu and Kashmir. In the initial gun battle, four Indian Army soldiers, including one officer, were killed.

Following the initial assault, the militants split into two groups and entered the living quarters of the base, opening fire with AK-47s and throwing grenades. They took hostage at least two infants, two women, and more than a dozen soldiers, resulting in a standoff with security forces. A statement from the Defence public relations office described the situation as a "hostage-like situation which was successfully neutralised." In the resulting operation, all three militants were killed and the hostages were freed by the Indian Army. Three additional Indian soldiers, including another officer, were killed during the rescue operation, bringing the total number of soldiers killed to seven, including two officers. The two officers who died, both of the rank of major, were identified as Akshay Girish Kumar and Gosavi Kunal Mannadir; both lost their lives in the initial response before the militants were killed.

The attack occurred against a backdrop of heightened tension in Kashmir following the killing of Burhan Wani and subsequent unrest, as well as the 2016 Uri attack and India's retaliatory surgical strike operation that followed it.

A subsequent investigation by India's National Investigation Agency (NIA), conducted over approximately two years, concluded that the operation had been organized by Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) deputy chief Abdul Rauf Azhar, according to the agency's final chargesheet. The chargesheet reportedly detailed how the three militants entered India, arranged financing, and received local assistance in carrying out the attack.

This dossier is based on a Wikipedia summary of the incident; two additional contemporaneous news sources (The New York Times and The Indian Express) are cited as corroborating references but their text was not available for direct review, so specific additional facts from those outlets could not be independently verified for this dossier.