Prabhakaran, the terrorist who plotted Rajiv's assassination

"It is a tragic incident."

This was how Velupillai Prabhakaran described former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's assassination 11 years after he hatched the diabolical plot to eliminate him.

The one-liner answer came from the once elusive Prabhakaran at a rare press conference in 2002 after the LTTE and Sri Lankan Government agreed to hold peace talks brokered
by Norway.

Prabhakaran, who was flanked by his top political adviser Anton Balasingham in the LTTE's de-facto capital of Kilinochchi, refused to take questions from media persons on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination.

The ruthless terrorist leader and his intelligence chief Pottu Amman hatched the plot to kill Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, a year after the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) left the Sri Lankan shores after fighting the LTTE for nearly three years.

Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman are named as proclaimed offenders in the Rajiv assassination case and have been sentenced to death in absentia.

At the press conference, when reporters persisted Prabhakaran to reply questions on Rajiv's killing, Balasingham, who provided the intellectual framework for the violence unleashed by LTTE, said: "It was something that had happened 10 years ago and those who ask questions about the incident are living in the past."

It is alleged that Prabhakaran wanted to avenge the Indian prime minister's decision in 1987 to deploy Indian peacekeeping force troops in Sri Lanka.

But, in his last days, Balasingham described Rajiv's killing as a "great tragedy, a monumental historical tragedy and called upon the Indian Government to be magnanimous to put the past behind and approach the Tamil question in a different perspective.

As he started losing his strongholds to the Sri Lankan forces, Prabhakaran, who once called India a "traitor" country, appealed to New Delhi to revoke ban on its organisation and help them in achieving the goal of Tamil Eelam.