January 11, 2006	Wednesday	Zilhaj 10, 1426

CHENNAI, Jan 10: The teenage daughter of a couple sentenced to death for the 1991 assassination of former Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi visited her parents in a southern Indian prison on Tuesday.

The 14-year-old Arithra met her father Murugan and mother Nalini, held separately in a federal prison in Vellore township of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

“She met Murugan for 45 minutes and later went to the special women’s prison and spent 30 minutes with Nalini,” one official said in the state capital of Chennai, adding that Arithra entered the high-security facility with her face masked in a black cloth.

The meeting marked the first time Arithra, who was born in prison four months after Rajiv Gandhi’s slaying, had seen her parents since being handed over as a baby to her grandparents, who now live in Sri Lanka’s northeastern Jaffna peninsula.

Arithra was accompanied to the prison by her grandmother, an official said.

The assassins’ daughter arrived in Tamil Nadu on Sunday, nearly four weeks after New Delhi cleared her visit to India and gave her a travel visa.

Ms Nalini was pregnant when she and her husband were arrested along with 38 others in connection with the killing of Rajiv Gandhi by a woman suicide bomber at a pre-election meeting in the Tami Nadu town of Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991.

A Tamil Nadu court prosecuted 26 of the suspects, but 19 of them were subsequently cleared by India’s Supreme Court which, however, awarded life imprisonment to three and upheld capital punishment for Nalini, Murugan and two other men.

Nalini’s death sentence has since been commuted to life imprisonment while Murugan’s mercy petition is pending with the Indian president.

The suicide bomber was later identified as Dhanu, a Sri Lankan woman who was given shelter prior to the attack by Ms Nalini, then 26 years of age.—AFP