About two hours after arriving in Madras (now Chennai), Gandhi was driven by motorcade in a white Ambassador car to Sriperumbudur, stopping along the way at a few other election campaigning venues.[1] Apart from former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the suicide bomber Kalaivani Rajaratnam, 15 people perished in the blast:[1][12][13] Around 43 bystanders, including police sub-inspector Anushiya Daisy, were injured in the explosion; there were 59 casualties in total.[15] The Supreme Court held that the decision to eliminate Gandhi was precipitated by his interview with Sunday magazine (21–28 August 1990), where he stated that he would send the IPKF to disarm the LTTE if he returned to power.The then governor of Tamil Nadu Bhishma Narain Singh, broke official protocol and twice warned Gandhi about the threat to his life if he visited the state.Subramanian Swamy said in his book, Sri Lanka in Crisis: India's Options (2007), that an LTTE delegation had met Rajiv Gandhi on 5 March 1991.From the Indira Gandhi International Airport, his body was sent to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi for an autopsy, reconstruction and embalming.[22] The Commission report stated that the year 1989 signified "the perpetuation of the general political trend of indulging the Tamil militants on Indian soil and tolerance of their wide-ranging criminal and anti-national activities".[28] Rajaratnam was described as Velupillai Prabhakaran's mentor, and he played a vital role in moulding the LTTE chief's thinking during the movement's formative years between 1972 and 1975.Kalaivani was survived by her mother, brother Sivavarman and two sisters, Anuja and Vasugi, the former died in a skirmish with the Indian army in Weli Oya in late 1991 and the latter moved to France.Another assumed reason as to why they were selected to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi was due to the genetics of the Rajaratnam-Pillai clan, of which many exhibited drastically different front and side profiles.On November 11, 2022, the Supreme Court of India ordered the release of six convicts in the 1991 Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, after the Tamil Nadu government controversially recommended their remission in March 2016, the convicts are: As per the Supreme Court of India judgment, by Judge K. T. Thomas, the killing was carried out due to personal animosity of the LTTE chief Prabhakaran towards Rajiv Gandhi arising from his sending the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka and the numerous war crimes perpetrated by IPKF personnel against Sri Lankan Tamils.[35] Additionally, the Rajiv Gandhi administration had antagonised other Tamil militant organisations like PLOTE for reversing the military coup in Maldives back in 1988.S. Nalini Sriharan is the lone surviving member of the five-member squad behind the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and is serving life imprisonment.Nalini was treated as a class 'A' convict from 10 September 1999 till the privilege was withdrawn in May 2010 after a mobile phone was allegedly recovered from her cell during a surprise check.[57] In 1998, it was published in a newspaper that an interim report by the Jain commission referred to a letter citing unverified information that Queen Aishwarya Rajya Lakshmi Devi Shah of Nepal had asked a courtier general of King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev of Nepal, "to arrange for the assassination of Shri Rajiv Gandhi…(for which) Rs 10 crore would be made available."[58] The interim report of the Jain Commission created a storm when it accused M. Karunanidhi the former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu of a role in the assassination, leading to Congress withdrawing its support for the I. K. Gujral government and fresh elections in 1998.[citation needed] In the 2001 Norway peace talks, Prabhakaran told the press that the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi was a sorrowful event.If you continue to interfere, your comrade Parasuraman of Ambattur who sneaked to the police about our presence there, will not be aliveIn a 2011 interview, Kumaran Pathmanathan, who was the Treasurer of LTTE and its chief arms procurer, apologized to India for Velupillai Prabhakaran's "mistake" of killing former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The stone mosaic that stands at the location where Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in
Sriperumbudur
Rajiv Gandhi Memorial path, the path that Gandhi took before being assassinated.