Protesters rained stones on the gate of an army camp in Jammu’s Rajouri district after soldiers purportedly killed two Dalit men working at a canteen there and injured another but later blamed the militants for the deaths.

The protesters, who included a senior BJP leader from its Scheduled Caste Morcha, questioned the army’s claim, wondering why no anti-militancy operation was launched if militants had killed the two men outside the gate of the camp.

The locals identified the two slain men as Surinder Kumar and Kamal Kishore, residents of Phaliana village in Rajouri. Videos of the protests showed dozens of youths throwing stones at the army camp with police and paramilitary men watching nearby. Earlier in the day, the army’s Nagrota-based White Knight Corps, also called the 16 Corps, had posted a tweet blaming “unidentified terrorists” for the killings.

“In an early morning firing incident by unidentified terrorists at Rajouri near Military Hospital, there has been fatal casualty of two individuals. The Police, security forces and civil administration officials are on the site,” the 16 Corps tweeted.

The families and protesters refused to take the bodies for cremation for hours and did that only in the evening when top officials promised a fair investigation. Locals said the bullet-riddled bodies of the two were found outside Alpha Gate of the local army camp in Phaliana early on Friday.

“The two were killed at 6.40am and now it is 5pm, but there is still no operation. We support the Indian Army, we respect them but if militants killed the two at the gate, as they claim, why did they (soldiers) not come out to chase the militants, or launch an operation?” Dr Garu Sanehi, vice-president of the BJP’s Jammu and Kashmir unit of the Scheduled Caste Morcha, who was part of the protest, told The Telegraph.

“There was no operation. The fact is that they (armymen) did not come out of the gate all day,” Sanehi added.