SOURCE: HT
A People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit commanding officer (CO) was among scores of Chinese soldiers killed in the June 15 Galwan Valley clash with Indian troops along the contested Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh, people familiar with the matter said on Monday. The Chinese commander’s death was confirmed to the Indian side through diplomatic and military channels last week, said one of the persons cited above, asking not to be named.
China has not said anything about any losses it suffered in the hand-to-hand combat. At a regular briefing on Monday, the Chinese foreign ministry stalled a query on the number of casualties the PLA suffered. The brutal clash at Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh resulted in 20 Indian deaths, including that of a CO. The Chinese army possibly suffered more than twice the casualties, Union minister General V K Singh (retd) said on Saturday.
It was the first such clash between Indian and Chinese soldiers along the contested LAC in 45 years.
The Chinese CO’s body was among the bodies exchanged by the two sides after the clash was over on June 16, said another person cited above.
The moment Indian soldiers realised that their CO, Colonel B Santosh Babu, had fallen, they fought against the Chinese soldiers with all their might and killed 16 of them and inflicted life-threatening injuries on scores of others in a fearsome counter-attack.
The seven-hour face-off involved three staggered clashes and saw the Indian soldiers put up a fierce fight against Chinese troops, who had been pulled out of another sector and freshly deployed on the disputed border to carry out the premeditated attack, as reported by HT on Monday. The Indian and Chinese COs were killed in the second and the most fierce round of fighting.
The clash involved 600 soldiers from both sides, with the Indians badly outnumbered.
Details from the debriefing of Indian soldiers involved in the skirmish revealed the heroism of the Indian troops, who fought off numerically superior rivals and the tactics of the Chinese soldiers.
The Indian soldiers were carrying weapons and ammunition. But they did not open fire as they were following border agreements between the two countries, the government said last week. The clarification came following a political controversy over whether the Indian soldiers were carrying weapons that could have been used to defend themselves.
https://defencenewsofindia.com/pla-unit-co-among-casualties-in-galwan/
