Robert Pious, one of the convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi murder case, sought mercy killing in a four-page letter he addressed to the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palanisamy. Pious, in his letter, said that he had lost all purpose in life.
“I have been in prison for more than 27 years now. None of my family members have come to see me in these 27 years. I don’t find purpose in life any more,” he said, in a letter written from inside Puzhal prison. Stating that even one of the judges who pronounced him guilty in 1999 had called him innocent, he said, “I am never going to be released from prison. I request euthanasia.”
"In 2014, then chief minister of Tamil Nadu J. Jayalalithaa had attempted to get us released. But now I understand that the government would want me to spend the rest of my life in prison. This is affecting not just me, but my family," Robert Pious said in his letter.
A Sri Lankan Tamil who was part of an LTTE commando team, Robert Pious was one of the key planners of Rajiv Gandhi assassination, as per the then investigation report. According to the report, he had confessed before police about his participation in the incident on May 21, 1991, in an election rally at Sriperumbudur. He is one of the seven convicts in the case, serving life term in Puzhal prison.
Supreme Court had already dismissed the review petition filed by the Tamil Nadu government. The petition sought review of the court’s December 2015 verdict which ruled against the state’s clemency decision. The court, hearing the petition on July 28 last year, had said that the centre has primacy over the state's right to grant remission in the case of Rajiv killers.
In May this year, another convict Nalini Murugan had written to United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) for release from prison, stating that she had completed her jail term.
