Mrs Gandhi killed by Sikh guards

Press, 1 November 1984, Page 1

Mrs Gandhi killed by Sikh guards

NZPA-Reuter New Delhi The Indian Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, died in hospital last evening, hours after she was shot several times. The Press Trust of India news agency said that the assassins were two Sikh members of her security guard.

P.T.I. said that she had died during emergency surgery. Later, an official Government spokesman said, “I cannot contradict the report (of her death).” He said that the Cabinet would hold an emergency meeting to decide on forming a caretaker Administration.

P.T.I. said that Mrs Gandhi had been shot with a pistol and Sten (submachine) gun as she walked from her home in southwest New Delhi to her office in an adjacent building. It reported that she had been hit by at least eight bullets. Staff at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where Mrs Gandhi underwent emergency surgery, said that she had been shot in the abdomen, heart, and a thigh. P.T.I. said that Mrs Gandhi had died in the operating theatre after doctors, including neurosurgeons, fought for her life for more than two hours. Hospital staff said that she was given cardiac massage as she was rushed to hospital. Doctors had also put her on a heart and lung by-pass machine in a bid to keep her alive.

P.T.I. said that the two assassins had surrendered and that three persons were arrested. In an earlier report the agency said that two persons had been killed at the scene of the shooting. A foreign news agency in New Delhi had a telephone call soon after the shooting from an unidentified man who claimed responsibility for killing Mrs Gandhi. “We have taken our revenge. Long live the Sikh religion. This is the act of the entire Sikh sect,” he said.

Sikhs have waged a hit-and-run war for a separate State in Punjab, a northern state bordering Pakistan. Security for Mrs Gandhi, her relatives, and members of Parliament, was tightened after the police said that they had received information that Sikh extremists were planning attacks in the Indian capital. The police threw an unprecedented security web round Mrs Gandhi’s Cabinet yesterday and sealed off the capital after the assassination.

A police source said that the entire 24,000 New Delhi police force had been put on maximum alert and that all leave had been cancelled. Security guards were doubled outside the homes of Government Ministers

and senior officials and all entry and exit routes to the city were sealed off. Work in Government and private offices stopped as tension rose in the streets of the capital. Reports that Sikhs were responsible for the attack had further stretched the security forces as police guards were deployed round New Delhi’s Sikh temples to prevent revenge attacks, the source said. Shops and businesses closed in New Delhi when All-India Radio interrupted its scheduled programmes to broadcast news of the shooting. More than 3000 people gathered outside the hospital. Anti-riot police cordoned the building, as well as Mrs Gandhi’s home, as crowds shouted, “Long live Gandhi.” In the Punjab holy city of Amritsar the five Sikh high priests called an urgent meeting to discuss the attack. Mrs Gandhi’s son and political heir apparent, Rajiv, was heading back to New Delhi from the state of West Bengal, P.T.I. said. Members of her family, including her, rebel daugh-ter-in-law, Maneka, gathered at the hospital immediately after the shooting. Reuter reports from Lon-

don that a leader of Britain’s Sikhs condemned the shooting, although saying that “she was more or less asking for it.” Mr Harcharan Singh, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Sikhs U.K., which represents Britain’s 300,000-member Sikh community, said that the shooting was “the act of a coward.” But he recalled the Indian Army’s storming in June of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine. “She was more or less asking for it.” After the temple storming, an exiled Sikh separatist leader, Jagjit Singh Chaunan, who lives in Britain, gave a warning that there was no shortage of people willing to assassinate Mrs Gandhi. On Tuesday, Mrs Gandhi had spoken of dying in the service of India, P.T.I. said. “Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it,” it quoted her as saying at a public meeting in the state of Orissa. “Every drop of my blood, I am sure, will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic," Mrs Gandhi said.

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