Rajiv Gandhi killers walk free

VELLORE, India: The last coconspirators jailed for the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi walked out of prison on Saturday, a day after the country’s Supreme Court ordered their release.

Gandhi, 46, was killed by a woman suicide bomber at an election rally in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in a plot by the the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Sri Lankan armed separatist group.

India’s apex court allowed the release of the six convicts, citing their “satisfactory conduct” in prison and the fact that they had already served over three decades behind bars.

Three of the six – Nalini Sriharan, her husband Murugan, and Santhan – walked out of two prisons in Vellore, about 140 kilometres from the regional capital Chennai, according to an AFP journalist at the scene.

Santhan and Murugan were driven away to a camp for Sri Lankan refugees soon after their release.

Local media said the others walked out of prisons in Chennai and the city of Madurai in the same state.

Three of the six convicts released on Saturday had initially been condemned to death before their sentences were commuted.

Gandhi became India’s youngest prime minister after his mother and predecessor Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

The Congress party has condemned the court’s decision as “totally unacceptable” and “completely erroneous”.

Gandhi’s son has over the years spoken about how he and his sister Priyanka 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.