By IANS,
Chennai : The Madras High Court Wednesday served notices to the state and central governments on a plea of Nalini Sriharan, convicted for the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, after the Tamil Nadu government rejected her plea for an early release.
S. Doraiswamy, Nalini’s lawyer, told the court that two more people, convicted of the same charges, also have filed a plea for premature release.
Gandhi was assassinated by female suicide bomber Dhanu in May 1991 in Sriperumbudur near here. Nalini and her husband Sriharan alias Murugan were sentenced to death for conspiring to kill Gandhi.
Nalini’s death sentence was commuted to a life sentence following Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s intervention on humanitarian grounds.
Nalini’s daughter Megara, at present pursuing higher studies in Britain, has applied for an Indian citizenship on the basis of her mother’s. She currently holds a Sri Lankan passport.
Murugan has written to the government seeking commutation of his sentence to life term, saying that the wait for a hangman for over seven years is a “condition worse than death”.