Indian court orders release of ex-PM Gandhi's killers

The highest court in India on Friday ordered the release of six people convicted over the 1991 assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The supreme court said the convicts were being freed due to their "satisfactory conduct" after having served more than three decades of jail time.

The six are the last still in jail for the killing, although two were already out on parole.

Who was Rajiv Gandhi?

Rajiv Gandhi was from the powerful Nehru-Gandhi family, which has dominated Indian politics for decades through the Indian National Congress party. The Congress party is currently in opposition.

The family is, however, unrelated to the late Mahatma Gandhi, who also headed the Congress party and led a nonviolent resistance to Britain's colonial rule of India.

Rajiv Gandhi became the country's youngest prime minister in 1984 after his mother and predecessor Indira was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.

Rajiv Gandhi's time in office was mired in controversy, including the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster which killed more than 2,000 people, the Bofors weapons procurement scandal and India's intervention in Sri Lanka's civil war.

Gandhi served just one term and was ousted in the 1989 general election by his former finance minister VP Singh, who led a breakaway party.

Gandhi remained head of the Congress party and was campaigning for reelection two years later when he was murdered.

Why was he assassinated?

In May 1991, Gandhi was killed by a female suicide bomber at an election rally for the Congress party in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

The assassination was carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an armed separatist group in neighboring Sri Lanka.

The LTTE or Tamil Tigers sought an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka's northeast and waged a bitter civil war against Sinhala-majority rule from 1976 to 2009.

Gandhi's killing was largely seen as a response to his move to send Indian peacekeepers to Sri Lanka in 1987 to disarm the Tigers.

India later withdrew its troops after losing more than 1,000 soldiers in fights with the rebels amid allegations of human rights violations in the island nation.

Twenty-six accomplices in total were convicted for the bombing, which killed 18 people.

What's been the reaction to the release?

The freeing of the convicts has been the subject of much debate, with the Congress party condemning Friday's court decision as "totally unacceptable" and "completely erroneous."

"It is most unfortunate that the Supreme Court has not acted in consonance with the spirit of India on this issue," the party said, tweeting a statement by senior member Jairam Ramesh.

Rajiv's son Rahul, and daughter Priyanka, who are seen as among current Prime Minister Narendra Modi's main political opponents, have spoken over the years about how the pair had forgiven their father's killers.

"We were very upset and hurt and for many years we were quite angry," the Indian Express newspaper quoted Rahul as saying in 2018. But they had since forgiven them, he said, "in fact, completely."

India has a significant Tamil population of its own, and state governments in Tamil Nadu have repeatedly called for the convicts to be freed.

Nalini Sriharan, one of the two convicts on parole, told broadcaster CNN News18: "I am very happy... I am very thankful to each and everybody."

The "last 32 years have been a struggle", she added.

She and her husband — another of the convicts ordered released by the court — were both initially sentenced to death.

Earlier this year the court freed another convict who had also faced execution, AG Perarivalan, citing good conduct.

Perarivalan was 19 years old at the time of arrest and had spent 29 of his 30-year sentence in solitary confinement.

 mm/aw (AFP, dpa, Reuters)