Indian shooters win two bronze

Zagreb (Croatia): Indian junior men did the country proud winning the bronze medal in the 10m air pistol team event at the ISSF World Shooting Championship in Zagreb on Sunday.

India tallied 1716 points with Amanpreet Jhaam firing an excellent 575 points while Bapu Vanjare and Zakir Khan shot 571 and 570 respectively.

China won the gold with 1726 points while Russia finished second with 1717.

Pu Qifieng (580) Mai Jiajie (578) and Lang Yu (568) took China to the summit while Leonid Ekimov (577), Sergey Chervyakovsiky (572) and Vasiliy Levichev (568) shot Russia to second place.

Harven Srao added another medal to the Indian kitty when she claimed the bronze medal in the 10 meter air pistol for junior women.

Srao fired 382 (91, 94, 99, 98) to book third place behind China's Liu Weiwei and Brankica Zaric of Serbia and Montenegro, both of whom scored 384 points.

However, the Indian junior women's team had to be content with fifth place in the event.

The team of Srao (382), Shweta Chaudhry (374) and Fatima Nausheen (370) tallied 1126 points.

China claimed the gold medal with 1139 points. Korea and Serbia and Montenegro finished second and third with 1132 and 1130 respectively.

However, the story was not so happy for the seniors as the hero of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, Samresh Jung finished a poor 31st in the event tallying 576 points.

Other Indian shooters in the fray were further behind as Vivek Singh finished with a point less in 44th place while Ronak Pandit languished in 98th place with 566 points.

China's Wei Pang fired 584 to grab first place ahead of Jakkrit Panichpatikum of Thailand who managed 582. Russia's Vladmir Gontcharov was one point behind to take the bronze.

The poor scores from Indian shooters meant the team finished 14th in the event with an aggregate of 1717 points.

China took the top honours with a total of 1747 points. Wei scored 584 while Zhongzai and Zongliang Tan contributed 582 and 581 points respectively.

Russia came second with 1745 points while the third spot went to France, who were a further 12 points behind.