New Delhi: The Supreme Court Wednesday granted bail to A G Perarivalan, one of the seven convicts serving life sentence in connection with the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, LiveLaw reported. The bail order comes in at a time when Perarivalan’s plea for the remission of his life imprisonment was pending before the President.
While granting bail, an apex court bench comprising Justice L Nageswara Rao and Justice BR Gavai took note of the fact that Perarivalan had been in jail for “over 30 years” and was “entitled to be released”.
The bench also noted that there was sufficient evidence of him acquiring educational qualification and skill set during his imprisonment.
Opposing his plea, the Centre had argued, “In case of offences to which the executive power of the Union extends, it is the Centre which is entitled to decide on a plea for release.”
The order came in response to a special leave petition filed by Perarivalan after the Madras High Court refused to hear his plea for commutation of sentence. Perarivalan’s lawyer had complained that he was currently on parole but was neither allowed to step outside nor meet anyone.
He had been granted parole thrice before and there had been no complaints regarding it, the court had observed. In 2014, the apex court had commuted the death sentence of Perarivalan and two other prisoners to life imprisonment on the grounds of an 11-year delay in deciding the mercy pleas by the Centre.
According to the Supreme Court order, Perarivalan won’t not be allowed to leave Jholarpetai, his native village, which is 100km away from Chennai. He would also have to report to the local police officer during the first week of every month according to the bail conditions.
Last November, the CBI told the Supreme Court that Perarivalan was not a “subject matter” of the investigation being done by the Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA), a CBI-led group looking into the larger conspiracy surrounding Gandhi’s assassination.
Perarivalan was a sympathiser of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) when he was arrested at the age of 19 for being a part of the terrorist group’s conspiracy to kill the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. He was accused of procuring batteries that were used to build the bomb that packed the vest of the suicide bomber, who wore it to Gandhi’s rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, on the evening of 21 May 1991.
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