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DECLARING that he wanted to send a message to would-be terrorists, a judge has ordered 26 Tamils convicted in the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to be executed on the same day.
The death sentence is rarely handed out in India, but Judge V Navaneetham said the ``diabolical plot'' to assassinate Gandhi justified his sentence.
``I hold this the rarest of rare cases and I award the death sentence for the accused,'' Mr Navaneetham wrote in his 2,050-page ruling.
The judge said he hoped his harsh sentence would deter ``other potential offenders and in the future dissuade our people from associating with any terrorist organisation to do such diabolical and heinous crimes''.
No execution date was immediately set. Lawyers for the defendants said they would appeal. Those convicted in previous political assassinations were hanged.
The text was released hours after the judge read it out in a court room closed to the public for security reasons.
Mr Navaneetham noted that Gandhi and 15 others lost their lives and scores were wounded in the 1991 suicide bombing.
He said the attack ``brought the Indian democratic process to a grinding halt''. Gandhi was killed as he campaigned for re-election, and voting had to be postponed after his death.
The judge also said investigators had gathered conclusive proof that the top leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka masterminded the assassination.
As prime minister, Gandhi sent Indian troops to Sri Lanka in 1987 to help the government put down the Tiger uprising launched four years earlier. The Tigers want to establish an independent Tamil state in northern and eastern Sri Lanka.
Lower-ranking Tigers were among the 26 men and women convicted and sentenced to death on Wednesday in the Gandhi assassination. Nearly 300 witnesses testified in the trial, which began six years ago.
Three leaders of Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, including the top rebel Velupillai Prabhakaran, were accused of ordering the assassination. The rebel leaders, charged but never captured for trial, are believed at large in the jungles of Sri Lanka.
Gandhi ``was assassinated in pursuance of a diabolical plot, carefully conceived and executed by a highly organised foreign terrorist organisation, the LTTE'', the judge wrote, referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Some Tamils from India who supported the Tiger cause were also among those convicted.
Two defendants in the trial, including the man who built the bomb, were convicted of murder. The others, who helped with planning or provided transportation, housing or food to the killers were convicted of lesser chargers.
But all were tried under special terrorist laws that made the death penalty possible.
Gandhi, the son and grandson of Indian prime ministers, was campaigning for his Congress Party near Poonamalee in southern India on 21 May, 1991, when a woman handed him flowers, then detonated 450 grams of plastic explosives strapped to her body.
The explosives, packed with 10,000 metal pellets, killed Gandhi and 15 others, as well as the Sri Lankan Tamil bomber, who went by only one name, Dhanu.
Twelve suspects _ including the man believed to have led the hit squad _ killed themselves by swallowing cyanide to avoid being captured by police in 1992. Associated Press
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