WikipediaExtracts:Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi
Extracted from Wikipedia --
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Former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bombing in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu on 21 May 1991. The incident resulted in the deaths of 17 people including Rajiv Gandhi and the perpetrator, 22-year-old Kalaivani Rajaratnam, a member of the Tamil militant organization Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
When Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister, he sent the Indian Army as a part of a peace keeping force in 1987 to intervene in the Sri Lankan civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE. The assassination was carried out before the 1991 Indian general election, in which, the Rajiv-led Indian National Congress was projected to win the majority seats. LTTE suspected that if Rajiv won, he would send the Indian forces, which had been pulled out in 1990, back to Sri Lanka.
An extensive investigation was carried out by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Central Bureau of Investigation, led by D. R. Karthikeyan. The SIT named 41 individuals in its initial chargesheet filed on the case. About 25 LTTE members, including the key conspirator Sivarasan and 12 members on the chargesheet, committed suicide during the investigation of the case. Three individuals—including LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran and intelligence chief Pottu Amman—were declared absconding. The other 26 individuals on trial were initially sentenced to death by a TADA court in 1998. However, on subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court of India, only seven were convicted and 19 other were released. Of the seven convicts, the four who were given the death sentence were never hanged, and all were released from prison in 2022.
Subsequent accusations of conspiracy have been addressed by two commissions of inquiry and have brought down at least one national government, the government led by Inder Kumar Gujral in 1998. The Rajiv Gandhi Memorial was opened in 2003 at the site where the bombing took place. The event has been the subject of several books and media.
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