The Supreme Court Wednesday ordered the release of A G Perarivalan, one of the life convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case. Perarivalan alias Arivu was 19-years-old when he was arrested on June 11, 1991. He was accused of having bought two 9-volt ‘Golden Power’ battery cells for Sivarasan, the LTTE man who masterminded the conspiracy. The batteries were used in the bomb that killed Rajiv Gandhi on May 21 that year.
Perarivalan was sentenced to death by an anti-terrorism court in 1998. The next year, the Supreme Court upheld the sentence but commuted it to life imprisonment in 2014. In 2018, Perarivalan approached the top Court aggrieved by the delay in his release despite a recommendation given by the Tamil Nadu government to remit his sentence.
