Rajiv Gandhi assassin’s mother pleads for son’s life

As the Tamil Nadu government awaits a formal word from the Centre on President Pratiba Patil rejecting mercy petitions of three LTTE activists involved in Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, mother of one of the accused, Perarivalan, arrived in the Capital to plead for his son's life.

As the Tamil Nadu government awaits a formal word from the Centre on President Pratiba Patil rejecting mercy petitions of three LTTE activists involved in Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, mother of one of the accused, Perarivalan, arrived in the Capital to plead for his son's life.

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Seventy-year-old K Arputham said, “My son was falsely implicated by the CBI. He was in no way part of the conspiracy to kill Rajiv Gandhi and does not deserve a death penalty.”

She was here to release the Hindi version of her son's book An appeal from the death row by CPI general secretary A B Bardhan. On May 21, 1991, the LTTE had used a woman suicide bomber to blow up Rajiv Gandhi at an election rally at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu.

Perarivalan's role in the assassination, according to the chargesheet, is helping another accused Sivarjan by purchasing two battery cells for the "human bomb" that killed Gandhi. “My son (Perarivalan)

was falsely implicated by the CBI,” Arputham said.

Arputham's plea is that if President K R Nayaranan could commute the sentence of Nalini, the first accused, why couldn't the President do the same for her son, the 18th accused. She said Congress president Sonia Gandhi had recommended commuting of the sentence even for her son.

Arputham referred to her son's book, in which Perarivalan held that the CBI's case was that he helped in the assembly of the “belt-bomb” but senior CBI officer Ragothaman, who probed in the case, had said in his book that the “puzzle” behind the “assembler” was still “unresolved” by the CBI.