Rajiv Gandhi murder case: SC seeks CBI reply over convict’s plea

The Supreme Court (SC) on Wednesday sought a response from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on the plea filed by A.G Perarivalan – a convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case – seeking recall of the May 1999 top court order upholding his conviction. Last month, a bench led by Justices Ranjan Gogoi and R Banumathi indicated that SC was not averse to re-opening the case against Perarivalan.

In his application, Perarivalan says he was handed his conviction by "playing fraud". He said that even though TADA was not applicable to this case, "the conviction was sustained only by reading the TADA confession statement recorded by a police officer under police custody." Perarivalan was 19 when the CBI arrested him in June 1991. He was convicted for purchasing two nine-volt batteries for the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) used in the killing.

Representing Perarivalan, advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan relied on a statement made by D.R.Karthikeyan (who headed the Special Investigating Team (SIT) investigating the matter) that the IED was locally made in Sri Lanka. "And internal evidence shows that the 9-volt battery was soldered with the IED. Then it could be said that the alleged 9-volt battery given by the petitioner was not at all used in the IED. Further, evidence on record does not even show that the parts of the batteries recovered were actually that of Golden Power 9 volt batteries."

The above statement absolved Perarivalan of all the guilt or even the knowledge about the alleged conspiracy, Sankaranarayanan argued.

Furthermore, he pointed out that ironically CBI's Multi Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA) probe about the larger conspiracy behind the assassination and the make of the IED was still pending, while Perarivalan was already convicted for his alleged role in providing the battery for the said IED.

Sankaranarayanan referred to an affidavit filed in 2017 by CBI officer V. Thiyagarajan which "completely wipes out the guilt and even knowledge of the petitioner [Perarivalan] about the alleged conspiracy". According to the petition, Thiyagarajan had submitted under oath that Perarivalan's confession that he was "totally in the dark" about why he was instructed to buy the batteries, was deliberately omitted.

The application also relies on a coded wireless message from Sivarasan, the mastermind behind the assassination, to Pottu Amman in Sri Lanka, which said that only he [Sivarasan], Subha and suicide-bomber Dhanu knew of the conspiracy to kill Gandhi.

Describing his case as "unique," Perarivalan submitted that he was "19-year-old boy when his mother handed him over to the CBI and now he is 45 years old, has lost all his prime youth in prison and in death row under solitary confinement for more than 16 years". He had already spent 26 years in prison. His "aged mother and father are waiting for their only son to join them at least in the last years of their life".

The top court confirmed Perarivalan's death sentence on May 11, 1998. In 2014, the death penalty was commuted to life sentence.