The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Read online

  Without that one crucial bit of evidence, the hunt for the assassins could have taken a different route. With it, the SIT was able to painstakingly track down all the killers, one by one, and bring them to justice.

  In Black and White

  On 23 May, The Hindu ran one of the photographs taken from the camera that Raghavan had retrieved and blew the case wide open. The new SIT head, Kaarthikeyan, says he hadn’t even seen the original prints at that point. The film roll extracted from the camera had been given to the chief of the Tamil Nadu Forensic Science Laboratory (TNFSL). The TNFSL head who had arrived at the blast venue with the local reporter from The Hindu was given the camera, and the newspaper gained access to the crucial roll of film when it was developed.

  The photograph shocked the world. There she was, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassin—the first female suicide bomber. And yet no one could identify her, no one knew anything about her.

  According to the SIT which swiftly went to work under Kaarthikeyan, apart from the ten frames, intelligence officials stumbled upon a video recording of the event by a music troupe that was entertaining the crowd that evening. It showed the same bespectacled young woman, dressed in an orange salwar-kameez, inching her way forward, trying to get close to the former premier. The outfit, favoured by women from the north and rarely worn by Tamil girls at the time, caught the attention of the then IB chief Narayanan as well. (Controversially, no recording of that video was subsequently seen or submitted as evidence and there are unconfirmed reports that the pertinent section of the video, when it did turn up, turned out to be blank.)

  Either way, this woman was unknown, an outsider. Who was she? Who was the man in white in the far corner of one of the other pictures? He had been cropped out of the photograph published by The Hindu because, as the newspaper’s editor N. Ram later told the SIT, he could have been a journalist. What was their connection to the assassination? Neither of them was a Congress party worker. What business did they have that night at Sriperumbudur?

  Within a day came the post-mortem on Rajiv Gandhi, which said he had ‘multiple penetrating wounds’, twenty-two injuries; part of his face, skull and most of his brain had been completely destroyed, and his badly mutilated upper body peppered with pellets.

  The CBI, says K. Ragothaman, one of its officers seconded to Kaarthikeyan’s SIT, had meanwhile sent the mutilated body parts of the hitherto unidentified woman found at the blast site for a DNA test to the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. Her face was still recognizable, Ragothaman says. ‘I can recall it like it was yesterday. She was the only one among the people who died in the blast that night whose body had been so completely dismembered.’

  ‘Her head had been severed from her body and was lying at a distance of 12 metres; her upper body cleaved in two, was in shreds, her right arm blown off, her left arm lying further away and both her legs were in separate pieces,’ he said. Like Rajiv Gandhi’s body, and those of all the other victims, hers too, bore strikingly similar pellet marks and burns.

  (The TNFSL chief, in fact, was pulled up by the SIT in their final report for ordering hospital staff to reattach the assassin’s decapitated head to her body.)

  The forensics teams from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, the TNFSL and explosives experts from the National Security Guard (NSG) who swept the scene on 23 May and gathered the first pieces of material evidence found that hundreds of metallic pellets lay littered at the spot. Among the debris of human body parts lay wires, two toggle switches and overwhelming evidence of the explosive RDX.

  The woman whose body was found closest to Rajiv Gandhi’s had been wearing an undergarment that was part vest, part belt. Experts piecing it together from the blood-soaked shreds discovered on the burnt-out red carpet, found that it was made of blue denim on the outside and on the inside. It had electric wires running through insulation sleeves concealed in the inner layer to support a slab of RDX that probably weighed half a kilo and was embedded with 10,000 pellets. This was integral to the ingeniously constructed Improvised Explosive Device (IED) that the human bomb was strapped to.

  The team of experts found that electric detonators plugged into the slab were connected to a 9-volt Golden Power battery through two switches—one to arm the device, the other to set it off.

  ‘On detonation, apart from the sound, fire and blast effect, the thousands of pellets would become projectiles or shrapnel travelling at furious speed, destroying everything in their immediate path,’ says Kaarthikeyan in his compelling book co-written with the late CBI officer Deputy Inspector General Radhavinod Raju.

  Rajiv Gandhi didn’t stand a chance. Nobody within 10 feet of the first human bomb on Indian soil did. Those of us on the periphery only survived because of the dense crowd around the Congress leader, which bore the brunt of the blast.

  Two things happened in quick succession after The Hindu published the picture of the human bomb.

  One, Kaarthikeyan’s investigative team which was able to connect the dots with incredible precision, filing their charge sheet within the year, accessed a policewoman, the eyewitness Sub-Inspector Anasuya who had survived the blast that had burnt part of her face and blown off three fingers. When shown the photographs, she confirmed that she had seen both the bespectacled woman and the man in the white kurta, as well as the young photographer, who had been hanging around, standing by the red carpet just before Rajiv Gandhi’s arrival.

  Secondly, after The Hindu published the picture of the dead photographer, from whose camera the tell-all images had been retrieved, he was identified as Haribabu by a journalist who knew him. The journalist also made a very interesting revelation. He told Kaarthikeyan’s team that Haribabu had introduced the man in the kurta-pyjama to him as the business partner of another photo-journalist they both knew.

  His suspicions aroused, the journalist called the photo-journalist the next day to verify the story. While the latter freely admitted that he had let Haribabu borrow his Chinon camera, he categorically denied knowing the kurta-clad man in the picture, who Haribabu had claimed was his (the photojournalist’s) business partner. The journalist alerted the SIT.

  Critically, Mr ‘White Kurta’ was not found among the dead or the injured. He was still at large. The SIT wasn’t sure if he was acquainted with the woman standing next to him, or whether they both were part of the team of assassins.

  The identification of Haribabu led to another lead that, for the first time, reinforced Kaarthikeyan’s own suspicions about the involvement of the LTTE terror group. Kaarthikeyan’s team discovered that Haribabu worked closely with another photographer, Subha Sundaram, who had pro-LTTE leanings and had famously played host to the Madras-based Tiger operative ‘Baby’ Subramaniam and many other LTTE sympathizers at his Studio Shubha.

  That’s when the finger of suspicion first pointed to the Tigers, who, until then, had only been tagged—as had the Khalistan Sikhs, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and Kashmiri extremists—as one of the many groups that had an axe to grind against Rajiv Gandhi and his family.

  At this point, the SIT concluded that Haribabu, an LTTE sympathizer, had been contracted to film the assassination—the LTTE was known to record everything—and possibly had stood too close to the female bomber and died accidentally in the blast.

  The IB came to much the same conclusion after an exhaustive review of the history of bomb blasts in Tamil Nadu perpetrated by the LTTE and other Sri Lankan Tamil militants in the southern state when the DMK government had been in power but had looked the other way, giving the Tigers a free run. The IB ruled out the Sikhs, given the logistics involved—organizing a hit from their area of operations in the north would have been impossible.

  The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) had a much harder time arriving at the same conclusion, given their long association with the militants and the ‘moles’ they cultivated within the Tiger ranks who played both sides with ease. The London-based Col Kittu (real name Sathasivan Krishnakumar), for
instance, was one of the people on RAW’s rolls, as maverick politician Subramanian Swamy says in his book, The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.2

  Soon after the assassination, Kaarthikeyan and CBI chief Vijay Karan left for Colombo on 30 May in a bid to see if the kurta-clad man in the photo and the woman bomber could be identified by Lankan Tamil groups inimical to the LTTE. At the same time, SIT sleuths began scrutinizing the various assassinations in Madras that had the LTTE’s imprimatur.

  Of major interest was the 19 June 1990 death squad, and the methods and weaponry they had used to savage and kill the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) leader K. Padmanabha and thirteen others with him at his office-cum-residence in Zacharia Colony in Kodambakkam, Madras. The killers had used grenades and AK-47s, and not a belt-bomb. Nevertheless, SIT sleuths saw how the solid wooden door of the apartment had been blasted open with grenades, and how the metallic pellets that were embedded in it replicated the ones found in the assassin’s belt-bomb.

  One of the grenades used in the EPRLF attack, which had not exploded, had both RDX and TNT, and contained 2800 pellets. The SIT was briefed that the grenade, which bore the stamp ‘SFG-87’ that stood for Singapore Fragmentation Grenade-87, had been manufactured by Chartered Industries of Singapore. The similarities were striking, but despite their efforts, Indian intelligence had been unable to identify Padmanabha’s killers. They had the names—David or Robert and Raghuvaran—but with no pictures and no identikit, it was impossible for the SIT to link the two killings or pin it on the LTTE.

  On 30 May, there was another tip-off from a resident of Villivakam colony in Madras. He said he recognized the woman in the green salwar-kameez. He had seen her when she visited his new neighbour, a woman called Nalini, along with another woman and a man, who had been introduced to him as Das. He knew Nalini was employed in an office in Adyar but had not seen her of late.

  In the first week of June, the SIT hit a mother lode when it unearthed a boxful of papers, letters and bills while searching Haribabu’s home in a Madras slum. The documents showed the extent of Haribabu’s involvement with the separatists. Haribabu’s father gave the SIT more boxes, one of which contained bills for the sandalwood garland that the bomber was holding when she approached Rajiv Gandhi. Other boxes revealed a chit that had Nalini’s and Das’s names on it, a telephone number and 3000 copies of an LTTE-compiled book called Satanic Forces, which was a collection of articles and opinion pieces that rained hate on the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and India’s Sri Lanka policy. As SIT investigator K. Ragothaman and author of Conspiracy to Kill Rajiv Gandhi from CBI Files3 recounts, the book was an eye-opener—the LTTE’s loathing for Rajiv Gandhi was its one recurring, chilling leitmotif.

  The final tip-off that would blow the lid off the LTTE conspiracy came when the photojournalist with whom Haribabu worked gave the SIT the name of the printer who had printed all the pro-LTTE material—Bhagyanathan. In him, they found the one source who would uncover the elaborate LTTE network of drivers, smugglers, supporters and spies that operated right under their noses across the state.

  Apprehended and brought in for questioning, the twenty-five-year-old Bhagyanathan was being interrogated at the SIT headquarters, when a female witness who had come forward and who had been present at the rally that night, confirmed that the two women in Haribabu’s pictures had been with Haribabu, the man in the kurta-pyjama and the human bomber, at the venue. She didn’t know their names or antecedents but said they were all together as one team.

  What followed in quick succession can only be described as a series of fortuitous coincidences.

  One of the sleuths interrogating Bhagyanathan at Malligai, the building from which the SIT was operating in Madras, was asked to come and see the pictures that the witness was being shown, only for him to realize that he was looking at Bhagyanathan’s sister Nalini, whom he had seen in the printer’s home but not approached as he had had no cause to at the time.

  Because of the chit of paper bearing her name that had been found in Haribabu’s box—which the SIT had widely publicized—Nalini had already been questioned by her employer. Thereafter, she had vanished. Her employer said she resigned on 9 June.

  Nalini’s complicity in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination was never in doubt for the SIT investigators. According to Bhagyanathan, he, as well as his mother, Padma, who was a nurse, and his sister, Nalini, had taken under their wing two women who had been brought from Jaffna and entrusted to their care by a man they only knew as Raghu Anna. Nalini even helped the suicide bomber pick out and buy the oversized salwar-kameez on the morning of 21 May. It was while the young woman was getting ready that her LTTE female companion confirmed to Nalini that the man they intended to assassinate that night was Rajiv Gandhi—and not Annamalai Varadaraja Perumal, the first chief minister of Sri Lanka’s North-Eastern Province and leader of the EPRLF as everyone had thought—and reportedly asked her to join them and watch history being made.

  Nalini, au fait with the plan to eliminate the popular Indian leader, had already participated in a dry run with the gang of would-be assassins on 7 May 1991 during V.P. Singh’s election rally in Madras. She had no qualms about going along to the ‘real’ thing. No longer an innocent bystander, more so as she had grown close to Das, she had attended office the day after the assassination as though nothing had happened, and did so every day until her boss confronted her on 9 June. After that, she never went back.

  By 4 June, Kaarthikeyan and his team had returned from Colombo—summoned back by the RAW chief—with a list of the who’s who of the vast LTTE network in Tamil Nadu that was a virtual state within a state.

  Indeed, in January 1991, after the fall of the pro-LTTE DMK government, a crackdown on LTTE operatives and their supporters had been wrongly surmised as successful.

  It was only when the SIT gained access to the list of Sri Lankan Tamils who had legally registered as foreign residents—while simultaneously tracking all the illegals, unearthing arms caches, wireless sets and huge amounts of cash—that the extent of the link between the mainland and the northern parts of the island, and the support they enjoyed, became clear.

  Critically, Kaarthikeyan had returned from Colombo with the all-important name of the kurta-clad man. He was known by a string of aliases—Sivaraja Master, aka Sivaresan, real name Pakiachandran, nickname Paki or Kannadianna (meaning bespectacled older brother in Tamil) and Raghu Anna. The one-eyed LTTE operative was from Udippidy, Jaffna, with links to Batticaloa in the east.

  Corroboration of his name came from the unlikeliest of sources. Just a day before the SIT chief’s return, a smuggler caught doing the Sri Lankan run from the coastal village of Thiruthuraipoondi to Jaffna had independently identified the kurta-clad man as the one-eyed LTTE operative, Sivaresan.

  In another major stroke of luck, Tamil Nadu Police stopped a young Sri Lankan Tamil speeding down a road near Vedaranyam on a motorcycle. When the SIT gained access to him, the man, Shankar, turned out to be part of the nine-member assassination squad under the command of Sivaresan, who had landed in the coastal village of Kodiakkarai, Nagapattinam, from Jaffna on 1 May 1991, along with the two women.

  This was later corroborated by Shanmugham, an Indian smuggler from Kodiakkarai, whom the SIT nabbed based on the information that Shankar provided.

  Shanmugham turned out to be one of the LTTE’s key pointmen on the coast, the big fish who led them to the Tigers’ secret stash of papers, photographs, videos, cyanide capsules, walkie-talkies and other equipment, as well as gold bars, cash and huge caches of guns and weapons.

  As Ragothaman says, ‘We collected thousands of photographs and videos of the LTTE training, one of which would finally help us home in on the identity of the human bomber and her handler.’

  Much to the embarrassment of the SIT, however, Shanmugham committed suicide on their watch. With the benefit of hindsight, says Kaarthikeyan, leaving the smuggler in the company of his own uncle and in a police station that was c
lose to his own home and that of his relatives—and his mistress—was a poor move. ‘We don’t know what transpired between Shanmugham and his uncle, but it led him to try to escape, and when he received no help from his relatives and the neighbours, he committed suicide,’ the veteran investigator said.

  Shanmugham had been working closely with the LTTE from Kodiakkarai since 1984, smuggling in people and arms under the cover of darkness. He had brought in the LTTE hit team that bumped off Padmanabha in 1990, and ensured their return to Jaffna once the job was done. Sivaresan was the head of that team.

  Shankar, the LTTE operative, told the SIT about the nine-member hit squad that Shanmugham personally received at Kodiakkarai on 1 May. It included Sivaresan, as well as a one-legged man brought for treatment at one of the three hospitals in the state that fitted wounded Tigers with the Jaipur leg on the quiet and who was believed to be the wireless operator of the Tigers’ intel chief. Also on that boat was Sivaresan’s right-hand man, Suthenthiraja; his own wireless operator, Nehru; two young women and three others, including Shankar.

  The interrogation of Shankar not only lifted the veil on the secret command structure of the Tigers in the state, it also led them to the various safe houses and hideouts where trained Sri Lankan Tamil assassins took shelter at the cash-rich Sivaresan’s behest, leaving the SIT chief marvelling at the legions of sympathizers the LTTE could activate, particularly from the openly pro-LTTE cadres of the Dravida Kazhagam.

  Most importantly, when he was caught, Shankar was carrying the office telephone number of Nalini—who, as wireless intercepts tracked by Indian sleuths revealed, was referred to as ‘Office Girl’—and a contact number for Robert Payas, the local LTTE intelligence operative who worked with the hit squad during the operation. Payas had sent off the message that the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, codenamed Operation Wedding, had been a success.