Supreme Court appoints amicus curiae to consider fresh probe into Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court appointed senior advocate Amarendra Saran as amicus curiae on Friday to examine documents related to Mahatma Gandhi's assassination after a petitioner claimed he was killed by a mysterious person who had fired "a fourth bullet".

A bench of Justices S A Bobde and L Nageswara initially expressed reservations in entertaining the petition, saying that a fresh probe would help achieve nothing in the seven-decade-old case, but asked Saran to assist in deciding the case after the petitioner claimed to have documentary evidence to prove that Gandhi's real killer was never caught.

Petitioner in SC questions 3-bullet theory

The bench was hearing a plea of Pankaj Phadnis, the founder of 'Abhinav Bharat', who questioned the three-bullet theory in the father of the nation's assassination. Phadnis approached the SC after his plea was dismissed by the Bombay high court.

"The investigation into the murder of Gandhi represents the biggest cover-up in the history of India. The blame on Marathi people in general and Veer Savarkar in particular for being the cause of the death has no basis in law and facts. On the other hand there is a compelling need to uncover the larger conspiracy behind the murder by constituting a new Commission of Inquiry," he said in his petition.

Demanding a fresh probe into the assassination, he claimed that "most newspapers throughout the world" reported that four bullets were fired at Gandhiji and that the "fourth bullet has remained a mystery all along".

The bench, however, asked him whether the third person, who according to him fired the fourth bullet, was alive to face probe. Phadnis replied that there was an organisation involved in the killing of Gandhi and it must be exposed even though the killer had himself died.