Rajiv Gandhi killers: SC defers hearing on Centre's plea

Contending that the power of remission under sections 432, 433 and 435 of the Code of Criminal Procedure was in conflict with the constitutional provisions, the plea said that it was the President and the Governor who had the power of remission under articles 72 and 161 of the constitution respectively and this could not overriden by a statutory provision.

Besides others, the petition is by some relatives of the other victims who lost their lives during the assassination.

The Tamil Nadu government on February 19 had announced its proposal of releasing all the seven convicts. The measure came just a day after the apex court commuted the death sentence of three convicts to life imprisonment.

Gandhi was killed by an ethnic Tamil suicide bomber while campaigning in an election in the southern Indian town of Sriperumbudur in May 1991.

The three Indian men - tried as Santhan, Murugan, Perarivalan - were members of a Sri Lankan ethnic Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and Gandhi's killing was seen as an act of retaliation after he sent Indian peacekeepers to Sri Lanka in 1987.

The three were convicted of involvement in 1998 and sentenced to death by hanging. A fourth person, a woman, was also given the death sentence but it was later commuted to a life term.

The men appealed for mercy but successive presidents gave no decision until 2011, when their plea was rejected.