President honours India's bravest soldiers

Major Anup Joseph Manjali was on Saturday awarded the second-highest peacetime gallantry award Kirti Chakra by President Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi for killing three foreign terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir.

12 defence personnel were awarded the Shaurya Charkra for their acts of bravery, including Captain A Rahul Ramesh and Naik Krishna Kumar who were given the honour posthumously.

Manjali, who was deployed in Jammu and Kashmir with the 24 Rashtriya Rifles battalion, had established a close cordon around five foreign terrorists while leading a counter-terrorist operation there on October 1 last year.

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"The officer displaying raw courage crawled up to the entrance of the Dhok and lobbed a hand grenade to flush out terrorists resulting in elimination of one terrorist on the spot," his citation read.

When the other terrorists attempted to escape, he chased them and "shot dead two more dreaded terrorists from a distance of approximately twenty meters in a most daring act."

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Captain A Rahul Ramesh, an Engineer with the Border Roads Organisation, was conferred the award posthumously for saving the life of his colleague while carrying out a bridge construction operation in Uttarakhand last year.

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The Shaurya Chakra awardees include Captain Manish Singh of 9 Para (SF), who was badly injured in a terrorist operation in Jammu and Kashmir.

The officer received the award from the President on a wheel chair. 10 senior officers were awarded the PVSM while 31 of them were given the AVSM.

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Naik Krishan Kumar was given the award for his role in a crisis situation in Congo where the Indian Army is involved as part of the UN Peacekeeping Mission.

A number of senior serving and retired defence officers were present on the occasion, including former IAF Chief Air Chief Marshal S P Tyagi. He is facing a CBI inquiry at the moment for his alleged role in the VVIP chopper scam.