JODHPUR / The Border Security Force (BSF) on Monday arrested a wing commander of the Indian Air Force on suspicion of espionage. He was found roaming a few meters away from the Indo-Pak border at Anoopgarh sector in Sriganganagar district on Sunday. After interrogation, the BSF handed him over to district police for further investigation. According to officials of BSF, a person was found roaming nearly 150 metres away from the fencing on the Indo-Pak border on Sunday evening. “The BSF personnel caught him and on interrogation he identified himself as Wing Commander Shashank Shekhar, posted in Chandigarh,” a BSF officer said. When the BSF contacted the IAF to verify his identity, they were told that he was suffering from psychiatric problem and undergoing treatment, said a BSF officer. “When we asked him the reason for being there, he gave a casual reply that he just wandered off to this place. Finding his activities suspicious, we searched him and found him possessing 9 blank cheques of different banks like Axis Bank, ICICI and PNB apart from his identity card and passport hidden in his shoes,” he added. The preliminary interrogation of BSF officials has revealed that Shekhar was on leave from August 23 to September 5 and had started from New Delhi to reach Anoopgarh through Jaipur and Suratgarh. “When we asked about the luggage, he said he lost it somewhere during the travel. But he failed to give us the reason behind getting so close to the border fencing,” said a BSF officer. “The activities of Shekhar has made us suspicious right from his “so-called” wandering off to the border and that too during leave from his duty to his replies,” the BSF officer added. The BSF then handed him over to the police. “He is mentally imbalanced and currently undergoing treatment,” said defence spokesperson Colonel S D Goswami adding that the IAF would take up the case and has ordered a court of inquiry against him. He is currently posted at Chandigarh and belongs to Ambala. The wing commander will now be subjected to a joint interrogation in which different agencies including police, BSF, military intelligence etc. will quiz him for his motive or the cause of wandering off close to the border.

MOSCOW  The Russian Foreign Ministry accused Ukrainian forces on Wednesday of responsibility for the “barbarous” killing of a Russian photojournalist and demanded an investigation. Andrei Stenin, 33, was confirmed dead earlier on Wednesday by his employers, state-run Rossiya Segodnya, or Russia Today, and by Russia’s Investigative Committee. He was the fourth Russian journalist killed in the conflict between Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and had been missing since early August. The Investigative Committee said in a statement it believed Stenin was killed on Aug. 6 while travelling with a convoy of refugees that was fired on by Ukrainian tanks close to the town of Snizhne in the Donetsk region. “He did everything so that people, the whole world, knew the truth about the tragic events in Donetsk,” President Vladimir Putin said in a letter of condolence to Stenin’s mother published on the Kremlin website. The Foreign Ministry issued a statement citing evidence from Rossiya Segodnya that suggested “this is yet another barbarous crime committed by the Ukrainian military and National Guard” and demanding an impartial investigation. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe(OSCE), a security and rights group, said it was appalled to hear of Stenin’s death and also called for an investigation. A senior Ukrainian Interior Ministry official, Anton Gerashchenko, said an investigation would not be possible until the Ukrainian authorities had access to the area where Stenin was killed. “Without access to the body, without specifying how he died, we will not be able to conduct such an investigation,” Gerashchenko told Ukrainian television channel 112. In addition to the Russian journalists killed covering the fighting between Kiev and pro-Russian rebels in east Ukraine, an Italian journalist was killed in May.