Ex-Indian PM Gandhi's killers to hang next month
CHENNAI, India, Aug 27, 2011 (AFP)
Three men convicted of the 1991 assassination of then Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi will be hanged early next month, a senior jail official has said.
The announcement late Friday that the executions would be carried out on September 9 came after India's president rejected mercy pleas from the three men earlier this month.
If they go ahead as scheduled, the executions will be first in India since 2004, when a former security guard was hanged for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl.
"The three men have been informed about the date of the hanging," said S. Arivudainambi, chief of the prison in the southern city of Vellore, where the convicts are being held, west of Tamil Nadu state capital Chennai.
The three men, Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan -- all known by one name -- have now appealed to Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalitha to save them from the gallows.
Students and lawyers have also been protesting against the executions.
All three men belonged to Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) militant group, which was accused of plotting the May 21, 1991 murder of Gandhi by a female suicide bomber.
Gandhi had become India's youngest ever prime minister after his mother, former premier Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in October 1984, and ruled until losing an election five years later.
The shredded clothes and the shoes Gandhi was wearing when he was killed while on an election tour in southern India 20 years ago remain on display in a museum in the national capital Delhi.
Although the Supreme Court upheld the original death penalty verdict for the three convicts it later commuted the capital punishment to life in prison for Nalini Sriharan, an Indian Tamil woman who was also convicted.
The three men had sought a presidential pardon after the top court's verdict.
The LTTE, wiped out by Sri Lankan forces in 2009 following a bloody offensive by government troops on the island, always denied its hand in Gandhi's assassination.
But the militant group's now-slain leader Velupillai Prabhakaran went on to honour the assassin's father as a "great person who contributed to the Tamil cause."
Gandhi's killing was seen at home as retaliation for a 1987 Indian government pact with the Sri Lankan government to disarm the guerrillas, who had been trained and armed by New Delhi in the early 1980s.
In May, India's president rejected a mercy petition from a murderer in the northeastern state of Assam, leaving the state scrabbling to find a hangman.
Many of the small number of known hangmen nationwide have either died or retired in recent years.
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