Assassination Suspect Found Dead in India

BANGALORE, India — The Sri Lankan Tamil militant believed to have masterminded the assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was found dead after a siege of his hideout, top police officials said today.

The one-eyed man identified as Sivarasan and six others, one an alleged woman accomplice, committed suicide by swallowing cyanide, they said. Sivarasan also had a bullet wound in the head.

“It appears that he not only consumed cyanide but he appears to have shot himself in the temple with his revolver,” senior policeman Ajay Kumar Singh told Reuters at the scene.

The siege of the house in a village on the outskirts of Bangalore, capital of the southern state of Karnataka, started Monday following the capture alive of seven members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Police said they surrounded the house, certain that Sivarasan, hunted since shortly after Gandhi’s May 21 murder by a woman suicide bomber in neighboring Tamil Nadu state, was inside.

Early today, a special team of paramilitary commandos blew off a back door with plastic explosives and burst in only to find all the occupants dead.

Police allowed reporters into the house to see the heap of bodies, which included Subha, a woman alleged to have been Sivarasan’s accomplice in plotting Gandhi’s death.