Word: satwant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nearly three years after they were sentenced to death for the 1984 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, gunman Satwant Singh, 25, and conspirator Kehar Singh, 53, were hanged last week in a New Delhi jail. Satwant Singh was one of the two Sikh bodyguards who shot Mrs. Gandhi; the other was killed in the shootout that followed. Five months earlier the Prime Minister had ordered the Indian army to rout Sikh terrorists holed up in the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Sikhdom's holiest shrine. Said an unrepentant Satwant: "I wish that I am born again and again...
Condemned to a hangman's noose were Satwant Singh, Kehar Singh and Balbir Singh. The three Sikh militants are not related; all Sikh men take the name Singh, which means lion. Satwant, who was one of Gandhi's security guards, opened fire on the Prime Minister while she was walking down a path near her residence. Kehar and Balbir, neither of whom was at the assassination scene, were accused of being part of a conspiracy to murder Gandhi, who was succeeded by her son Rajiv...
...were no more than seven feet away as she greeted them. Beant Singh drew a .38 revolver and fired three shots into her abdomen. As she fell to the ground, Satwant Singh pumped all 30 rounds from his Sten automatic weapon into her crumpled body. At least seven bullets penetrated her abdomen, three her chest and one her heart. The Prime Minister was dead...
...fear." When the director of the country's central intelligence organization suggested to Mrs. Gandhi in July that Sikhs be removed from her security staff, she had refused. "How can we claim to be secular?" she had asked in a hastily scrawled note. Not far from Beant Singh stood Satwant Singh, 21, who had been assigned to Mrs. Gandhi's detail five months before...
...their guns. As other security guards seized them, Beant Singh said, "I've done what I had to do. You do what you want to do." They were then taken to a guardhouse, where Beant Singh suddenly lunged for the Sten gun of one of the loyal guards as Satwant Singh pulled a dagger from his turban. The guards shot them both. Beant Singh died almost instantly; Satwant Singh was critically wounded. Later he told doctors that he was a member of a conspiracy that included a high-ranking army officer, and that another of their targets was Rajiv Gandhi...