The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi Page 4

  Bhagyanathan, when confronted with all of this, sang like a canary. He gave the SIT the full story, confirming Sivaresan’s identity and that his real name was Raghuvaran or Raghu Anna. He also revealed that the one-eyed LTTE operative was the same man who had planned and executed Padmanabha’s murder, which won him the unstinting praise and admiration of the outfit’s chief, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, and resulted in his being entrusted with the onerous task of eliminating Rajiv Gandhi.

  Bhagyanathan, young and impressionable, befriended by the LTTE’s printer of propaganda, ‘Baby’ Subramanian, and another LTTE communications expert, Muthurajah, had quickly become part of the inner circle. But when questioned, he had little hesitation in naming the suicide bomber as Dhanu, her female companion as Subha, the possible standby bomber about whom very little is known, and the person who was seen in Nalini’s company as Murugan alias Sriharan alias Das or Indu Master, who was Sivaresan’s all-important Sri Lankan Tamil assistant and the explosives expert who helped build the belt-bomb.

  The SIT finally had the who’s who of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins.

  Bhagyanathan also named several other Indian Tamils in thrall to the LTTE, including Arivu, real name Perarivalan, who would help Sivaresan buy the batteries that would power the belt-bomb that he and Murugan would construct, as well as a scooter and the wireless which Sivaresan used to communicate directly with Pottu Amman, the LTTE intelligence chief.

  Three weeks into the investigation, the trail to Nalini and Murugan had gone cold. But, unfazed, on 11 June 1991, less than a month after the assassination, the SIT made its first formal arrests, detaining Bhagyanathan and his mother, Padma. There was no sign of ‘One-eyed Jack’ or, for that matter, the other woman caught on camera, Subha. But the SIT hoped they were closing in. Tracking down one LTTE operative after another who had been sent by Pottu Amman on the boat with Sivaresan saw all roads lead back to the mastermind. He was the spider in the web.

  This is when the SIT stumbled upon another LTTE plot to assassinate a man whom the outfit had long seen as an Indian collaborator. While putting the final touches to the plan to eliminate the former Indian prime minister, Sivaresan was simultaneously trying to bring down Varadaraja Perumal, who had been installed in office much to Prabhakaran’s chagrin when the IPKF had the LTTE with its back to the wall.

  Sivaresan despatched an operative to Gwalior, where the EPRLF leader had taken refuge after the IPKF’s retreat and Rajiv Gandhi’s electoral defeat in November 1989. But with Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and the mood against Sri Lankan Tamils turning ugly across the country, the LTTE operative he sent to Gwalior hot-footed it back to Tamil Nadu, hoping to meld in, only to be nabbed by the local police in Thanjavur. Varadaraja Perumal, the one man whom Sivaresan—and Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman—failed to eliminate.

  And then, in the last week of June, the SIT would strike gold. While interrogating an LTTE operative, the SIT was told about the arrival in the last week of April 1991 of an old man named Sabapathy Pillai aka Kanakasabapathy Muthiah Sivaguranathan, whom Sivaresan wanted to ensconce in a Delhi house in Moti Bagh as part of his plan to attempt to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi in the capital, New Delhi. The Delhi house rented, Sabapathy, father of a slain LTTE commander of Jaffna, returned to the south to pick up his ‘daughter-in-law’ Athirai.

  Oddly, despite the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Sabapathy and the girl were booked on a train back to Delhi on 1 July. The SIT, under the impression that the girl could be Subha, pulled out all the stops, arresting her and Sabapathy from a small hotel in Delhi.

  She, however, wasn’t Subha. But, as Ragothaman says, it was with the arrest of Athirai that the SIT investigators were finally able to tie up all the loose ends.

  Athirai was Pottu Amman’s Plan B. She was the alternate suicide bomber sent to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi in Delhi if Sivaresan’s plan failed in Madras. After her arrest, Athirai, whose real name was Chandralekha but called herself Gowri or Sonia, would lay out the plot to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi in the greatest of detail to the SIT.

  All the SIT needed now were the actual assassins—Sivaresan, Subha, Nalini and Murugan.

  The Hunt for Sivaresan

  Minutes after Dhanu blew herself up—after giving her mentor Sivaresan fair warning—Nalini, Subha and Sivaresan rushed to the Indira Gandhi statue just beyond the grounds and caught an autorickshaw into the city. They were heading to one of the many homes that LTTE sympathizers had lent them in Kodungaiyur, provided to them by an Indian Tamil who was married to a Lankan Tamil and had worked with the LTTE in various capacities. The next day, the group left for Tirupati, only returning to Madras on 26 May.

  By then, with the photographs of Dhanu, Sivaresan and, later, Nalini published in the newspapers, the SIT began to get alerts from across the state that claimed they had been spotted. Sivaresan kept a low profile, rarely venturing out and putting up posters that were pro-Congress and pro-AIADMK to cover his tracks.

  Most of the leads were dead ends. But in the case of Nalini and Murugan, the couple’s luck ran out when they returned from Madurai to Madras and got spotted at the bus stand in Saidapet. They were formally arrested on 14 June. Nalini was pregnant with Murugan’s child.

  Kaarthikeyan, who interrogated them himself, says he was struck by her fiery, unrepentant defiance, her commitment to the LTTE, her strong conviction that the Tigers had been wronged, and her love for the younger man in her life, who was the father of her unborn child. Nalini, like her brother, Bhagyanathan, had no hesitation in owning up to the assassination, Kaarthikeyan said, although what her lawyers said in court would be an entirely different story.

  More arrests quickly followed. The next to be nabbed was the hardcore Dravida Kazhagam activist and LTTE sympathizer Arivu aka Perarivalan—who helped put together the belt-bomb alongside Murugan—and Payas, who, along with his brother-in-law Jayakumar, were the LTTE’s secret intelligence operatives in Madras.

  Sivaresan was hiding in plain sight, in Eveready Colony in Kodungaiyur, using the home of an LTTE sympathizer, Vijayan, to send out short bursts from a wireless station that he had set up, which the SIT was unable to track despite their best efforts. A rogue radio station, only a stone’s throw from the SIT’s headquarters.

  But nabbing Suthenthiraja, Sivaresan’s most trusted assistant, after Athirai tipped them off on his hideout—he was dragged from his bed before he could swallow his cyanide pill—was to prove one of the SIT’s biggest coups and, certainly, Sivaresan’s undoing. Not only could Sivaresan no longer bank on this key operative who outed their Kodungaiyur safe house, forcing him and Subha to flee, the young man would tell the SIT every last detail, conclusively implicating Sivaresan and the LTTE in Rajiv Gandhi’s killing, and helping them prove the link with the 1990 killing of the EPRLF’s Padmanabha.

  Suthenthiraja aka Santhan was a neighbour of Sivaresan’s from his village in Udippidy, and had known his boss as the son of an English teacher, Chandrashekharan Pillai of Veerabhadra Koiladdy. Suthenthiraja was a classmate of Sivaresan’s younger brother, Ravichandran, who headed the Students Organization of the Liberation Tigers, and who probably died when he was taken into custody by the IPKF. Sivaresan, once an employee of the electricity board in Batticaloa, lost his eye in May 1987 in a clash with the Sri Lankan security forces and, some say, may even have been flown by the IPKF into Tamil Nadu for treatment.

  That didn’t change his loyalty to ‘Thalapati’, LTTE chief Prabhakaran, who picked him for three crucial hits—Padmanabha, Varadaraja Perumal and Rajiv Gandhi.

  Suthenthiraja had been hand-picked and planted in Madras by Sivaresan in February 1990, to befriend and infiltrate the EPRLF’s inner circle. It was the friendly young man’s specific tip-off on a gathering of the EPRLF’s top leadership to Sivaresan, giving him the exact time and place of the meeting, that led to the bloody attack on the Lankan Tamil group that Suthenthiraja participated in.

  The politics of revenge that characterized the LTTE’s brand of settling po
litical scores, had been imported into India.

  Based on the master list, courtesy a suspiciously co-operative Colombo under then President Ranasinghe Premadasa, members of Sivaresan’s inner circle were being tracked down and nabbed, one by one. But the wily One-eyed Jack, Sivaresan, was always one step ahead of the SIT, proving to be far more elusive than they had anticipated.

  Unleashing the Karampuli

  Dhanu, the human suicide bomber, fascinated the sleuths. This was clearly not her real name, and the motivation and dedication that led her to take this path could only have come from sustained fanning of anti-India hatred from the LTTE’s savvy propagandists such as Yogi and Prabhakaran himself.

  Among the photographs, videos and cassettes that were seized by the SIT from Perarivalan and Bhagyanathan in their hunt for evidence to tie the LTTE to the assassination, was a clip, one of many that a top LTTE operative had brought in from Jaffna. It showed female LTTE cadres somewhere in the north of the island nation marching to the tune of a martial band. To the SIT, the flag-bearer at the head of the group bore a remarkable resemblance to Dhanu.

  In August 1991, The Hindu’s Frontline magazine ran a story that corroborated the SIT’s conclusions on Dhanu’s antecedents as a child of the cause for Tamil Eelam. It said she was the daughter of Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist who had inspired Prabhakaran when the former signed on as one of the earliest members of the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Katchi, and the Puli Padai, the Tiger Army.

  In June of that year, only days after the assassination, and in a departure from normal practice, Prabhakaran honoured his hero Rajaratnam and others, including the Tamil Nadu-based Kasi Anandan, in a special ceremony, even though the former had been dead for sixteen long years, while in exile in Madras. Was this a disguised tribute to Dhanu? The only way that Prabhakaran could say thank you, perhaps?

  The LTTE quickly got into the act, using a resident of Urumpirai in Jaffna to put out an elaborate denial of Dhanu’s parentage. Any confirmation that she was a serving member of the LTTE would expose their role in the assassination—and they did not want that made public. After all, this was a terror group that dreamed of a Greater Eelam and being known as the killers of Rajiv Gandhi, who was adored by Tamilians, would mean losing support in Tamil Nadu.

  Claiming that Dhanu had no link to the Rajaratnam family, the Urumpirai resident added that Rajaratnam’s second wife and their second daughter, Anuja, were in fact in mourning, as the youngest daughter, Kalaivani aka Capt. Akino, had died in battle, while Anuja herself was recovering from injuries in another skirmish with the Sri Lankan army. Rajaratnam’s eldest daughter, Vasugi, and a son, Sivavarman, from his first marriage, the man said, lived in Canada.

  Despite the lie, SIT’s skilful skull superimposition conclusively proved that Dhanu was the same girl as the one named Capt. Akino, codenamed Anbu, who was heading the march.

  This would make her Rajaratnam’s daughter—real name Kalaivani aka Gayatri aka Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, resident of Kaithadi, Nunavil, Chavakacheri, born on 26 July 1968, purportedly died 8 September 1991, according to the LTTE’s diary of heroes, Maaverar Kuripedu.

  The interpolation of Dhanu’s real name into the list of the 243 young women who died in battle in September 1991 wasn’t too difficult, the SIT investigators concluded.

  Given the sustained propaganda against the IPKF, the prevailing view among the Sri Lankan Tamils was that Dhanu had been willing to give up her life to avenge the many alleged rapes and violations of Lankan Tamil women by the Indian soldiers, including, allegedly, a close relative and, some say, even herself.

  Norwegian peace negotiators like Erik Solheim say, ‘She may have been barely sixteen at the time the IPKF were deployed in Jaffna, and the prevailing story, every time the subject was brought up was that either she or a member of her family had been raped. And, that this was payback.’

  The bomb itself was put together piece by piece, with the 9-volt batteries and the various switches, toggles and wires, and the 0.2-mm diameter metallic balls and pellets. These were bought by Kumaran Pathmanathan or ‘KP’, chief arms procurer for the LTTE, from arms merchants across the world, and put together locally by Perarivalan, the Indian LTTE sympathizer, along with Murugan. The actual IED and the pellets and grenades were probably brought in through the worldwide network of smugglers that KP oversaw, who had easy access to India’s coastline.

  The deputy head of the Black Tigresses, Akila, had described Dhanu—barely twenty-three when she blew herself to bits—as a ‘child of fire’, a veiled reference to the human bomb.

  But what is really interesting is that the SIT’s remarkable information gatherers give ‘credit’ for the human-bomb concept, not to Prabhakaran as everyone else universally did—and does—but to the deputy head of the Karampuli, the Black Tigress, Akila, who came up with the idea of strapping an IED on a person’s body to gain access to the target—in this case, Rajiv Gandhi—long before it was adopted by the Taliban and the Islamists in the Arab world as their weapon of choice.

  Lt Col. Akila, who would die in battle in October 1995, was the SIT’s Accused No. 3. Only Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman, being Accused No. 1 and Accused No. 2 respectively, were higher on the list.

  When the Walls Close In

  As the photographs of the assassins of Rajiv Gandhi were splashed across the city of Madras and Tamil Nadu and the neighbouring states through early June, Sivaresan, forced to go into hiding, continued to use his secret wireless radio to communicate with LTTE intelligence chief Pottu Amman in Jaffna, updating him on the arrests of members of the hit squad and various LTTE supporters, pushing all the while for a safe passage home for himself and the fallback suicide bomber, Subha.

  When a reward was announced for anyone who had information about them—Rs 10 lakh for Sivaresan and Rs 5 lakh for Subha—the SIT was besieged with tip-offs.

  But Pottu Amman had no intention of letting these two key operatives fall into the hands of the SIT and, in message after message, asked them to lie low and ensure they had their cyanide pills with them at all times, a signal that they must evade capture at any cost.

  With President’s rule in place in Tamil Nadu post the assassination, and a heightened security alert, the LTTE’s smuggling of arms and people between the coasts had virtually ended. Every boat, every smuggler, every gun-runner was being watched and monitored.

  Sivaresan’s access to his own Tiger network inside Tamil Nadu was severely curtailed when the SIT began picking up both Lankan and Indian Tamil LTTE supporters across the state.

  In Dindigul, the police stumbled upon what would be the LTTE’s fifth column inside Tamil Nadu, the so-called Tamil National Retrieval Troops and the Tamizhar Pasarai, headed by a pro-LTTE Indian Tamil, Ravichandran, who had been sending Tamil youths to be trained in Jaffna. He had been tasked by the LTTE supremo with destabilizing the southern state on the lines of Jammu and Kashmir as part of the quest to create a Greater Eelam that spanned the Palk Strait.

  Prabhakaran believed—mistakenly—that once Rajiv Gandhi had been eliminated, the Tamils, with the active support of the local Indian political parties, would rise up to fight the Indian state alongside the LTTE and the country would plunge into chaos and disintegrate.

  Pottu Amman, realizing that the walls were closing in on his man, activated his well-entrenched intelligence chief in Tamil Nadu, Tiruchy Santhan, and his aide, Irumborai, to arrange for the escape of the three people in the know of the assassination—Sivaresan, Subha and the wireless operator named Nehru—rather than let them fall into the hands of investigators and conclusively implicate the LTTE.

  But the boat sent by Pottu Amman sank before it made landfall.

  SIT sleuths, who recall the hunt for the assassins, recount how Sivaresan simply dropped off the face of the earth for nearly three weeks, even though he was now relying exclusively on the LTTE intelligence network run by Tiruchy Santhan that RAW and IB operatives had always closely tracked.

  In fact, it was bein
g tracked even more closely, now that they had proof that the Prabhakaran protégé was being shepherded from one location to the next by Tiruchy Santhan’s wireless operator, a man named Dixon, and the LTTE’s intelligence group operative named Kanthan. In a bid to rattle the LTTE and let them know they were on to them, even though in reality they had no idea where Sivaresan really was, the SIT published the two men’s pictures.

  The SIT finally closed in on Dixon after two of his associates were caught and one of them, Vicky, spilled the beans about Dixon’s Coimbatore lair. It was the centre, they discovered, for a clandestine LTTE-managed factory to manufacture grenade shells. As the SIT closed in, Dixon took his own life on 28 July and, critically, destroyed the wireless set that Tiruchy Santhan had been using to contact Pottu Amman. By then, Kanthan had escaped to Jaffna.

  Dixon’s associate Vicky also told them about the man who had been entrusted by Tiruchy Santhan to take care of Sivaresan—Suresh Master—and the two cars, a green Maruti and a blue air-conditioned Premier Padmini, that were being used by the group to get around the state from one safe house to another.

  Sometime in late July or early August, Suresh Master, working with his LTTE colleague Rangan, pulled off Sivaresan and Subha’s escape from Madras in a move that was nothing short of masterly. Rangan approached a Mettur transporter and LTTE sympathizer, Dhanasekharan aka Raja, to give them an empty oil tanker, into which he smuggled Sivaresan, Subha and Nehru, and escorted them, through the night of 2 August (one version claims it could have been as early as 28 July) through the neighbouring state of Karnataka and into Bangalore, without once being stopped or arousing the suspicion of the police!

  Bangalore is where everything that could go wrong, did. But it would be another sixteen days before the SIT would finally track them down to their new lair.

  Suresh Master had managed, unknown to the Bangalore city police and intelligence officials, to shelter and treat dozens of his injured colleagues from the LTTE in two safe houses in the city—one in Indiranagar, the other in Domlur. He had used a Bangalore-based lathe operator, Ranganath, to find these safe houses, including one for Sivaresan and Subha, without telling him who it was for. Ranganath first took the group to his own home, a house in Puttenahalli that he had rented for himself from a Congress partyman, Anjaneya.