NEW DELHI, May 7: The Indian defence establishment was shaken to its roots on Friday over revelations by a newspaper that its officers on duty in the Siachen Glacier had routinely stage- managed encounters with imaginary Pakistani troops.

The idea was to paint the Indian officers with false glory that would fetch them coveted gallantry awards. The army promptly admitted to faking encounters with "enemy personnel" in Siachen last year and said administrative action has been ordered against a colonel and a major and disciplinary action taken against another major.

An army spokesman told reporters in New Delhi that a Court of Inquiry (COI) has named Major Surinder Singh for faking the killings and disciplinary action has been ordered against him.

Administrative action has been ordered against Colonel K. D. Singh and Major Rohit Lama for what the army described as "administrative lapses". The spokesman denied that Indian Army was claiming awards for "imagined gallantry" as reported in The Hindustan Times on Friday.

Analysts said the revelations had come at a crucial time in the Indian elections and could harm Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's bid for another term. The last leg of the four-phase polls is due on Monday.

Mr Vajpayee's right-wing nationalist supporters are known to be partial to the army and object to public discussion of recent revelations of scandal-ridden financial deals involving the defence establishment.

Indian security forces have been blamed in the past for faking "encounter deaths" in Kashmir and elsewhere, partly due to the pressure of "performing" against anti-Indian militants.

Earlier, the Defence Ministry admitted in a press release on Friday that Major Singh had been blamed by the court for "having faked the killings of enemy personnel", but this version was changed later with an army spokesman confining himself to stating that this officer had been "found culpable of having exaggerated and faking some events on the Glacier".

The spokesman said the Commanding Officer and Major Lama were held "guilty of committing acts of omission and commission of administrative nature and not operationally-related nor to Major Singh's events."

To questions whether the expose had sullied the image of the army, the spokesman sought to downplay the report. He said these the incidents were "individual events" and that stringent action would be taken against the guilty.

The Hindustan Times said that during hearings at the court of inquiry (COI), at which Major Singh also gave details about fake kills by units other than his own, the so-called "enemy hits" in Siachen came under severe scrutiny.

One issue was the distance from which the video recordings of the "kills" were made. It was pointed out that the videos had been tampered with, and that the "enemy troops" seen on tape had not been, contrary to standard practice, "roped in".

Questions were also raised on the effective ranges of precision weapons - some of the "enemy kills" appeared to have been made at 1,500 metres, by jawans not trained to use sniper rifles.

"Facing the COI, Major Singh's commanding officer (CO) Col K. D. Singh vehemently denied all the charges of fake killings except those pertaining directly to Maj Singh," The Hindustan Times said.

Col Singh claimed that the only fake "kills" were those made by the Major himself on two occasions, and that the officer had been warned about them. He described Major Singh as having a diabolical frame of mind. He said that he (Col Singh) had instructed officers to give "correct, timely and unexaggerated reports". The veracity of videos of the "kills" was proved by the "excitement and zeal" in the background voices, he argued.

"It is amazing how the army failed to smell a rat about the abnormally high numbers of enemy 'kills' in Siachen," The Times said, quoting sources. Nobody seems to have found it strange that except on a handful of occasions, there was no retaliatory fire from the "enemy" when the "kill" was made.

Said an Intelligence officer in Leh: "In the last week of August when there was a genuine enemy kill, Pakistan kept firing at and shelling us for nearly 24 hours." 5/5 Gorkha Rifles has since moved on to elsewhere in Jammu and Kashmir. It has been replaced by a battalion of Jammu and Kashmir Rifles in the routine six-monthly turn-over of units on the Siachen Glacier.

Indian and Pakistani troops have been deployed since 1984 on the snowy wastes of the Siachen Glacier, north of the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. It is one of the world's most inhospitable places, where more soldiers die of cold and altitude sickness than through enemy action.

"Based on certain complaints that enemy killings have been fabricated by one unit in central glacier, a court of inquiry was ordered," the Defence Ministry said in a statement.

It said a major had been found guilty of "having faked killings of some enemy personnel and destruction of enemy bunkers." The officer faces disciplinary action.

The Hindustan Times said that a third of the 50 killings of Pakistan soldiers attributed to Indian troops on the Siachen Glacier last year may turn out to be false. To make their claim realistic, Indian troops built an air defence bunker on their side of the glacier and destroyed it with rockets and mortars, claiming it was a Pakistani bunker, the newspaper said.