Srinagar, June 13: Five Border Roads Organisation officers, including a Lieutenant Colonel, were shot dead near Jammu’s Kishtwar in this year’s biggest militant strike in the state.

“The incident took place at 5.30pm when they were ambushed while returning from road reconnaissance in Kishtwar,” defence spokesperson Lt Colonel S.D. Goswami said. The strike comes five days before the Amarnath Yatra.

Lt Colonel Ajay Kumar Verma, the officer in charge of Project Beacon, his deputy S.K. Singh and three others were driving back to their base when the militants waylaid their vehicle and fired at them. All of them, including an engineer, died on the spot.

Brigadier A.K. Butani, the chief engineer of the project, said all five died as they were in the same vehicle. Police have launched a combing operation to track down the militants.

Project Beacon officers are working on a project to connect Kishtwar directly with Kashmir, reducing the distance between the town and state capital Srinagar by a third.

Beacon is one of the three projects — Sampark and Himank are the other two — that the Centre-run organisation has kicked off in the Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh regions of the state. It already maintains the crucial highways connecting Jammu, Srinagar and Leh.

Beacon is based in Kashmir. Outside the Valley, it covers Kishtwar and some other parts of Jammu. Officers of the project played a key role in making the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road good enough for use in 2005.

Several of them lost their lives on duty in the earthquake that rocked both parts of Kashmir in October that year.

Militant strikes have come down sharply over the past several months but security agencies fear a spurt in violence ahead of the Assembly polls later this year.

In another incident, 12 shoppers were injured when a grenade lobbed by militants at an army patrol missed the target and exploded in a market in Baramulla district.