Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi

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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...

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