On the humid night of May 21, 1991, an explosive blast at an election rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, altered Indian political history forever. The suicide bomber, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, alias Dhanu, detonated an RDX-laden belt that instantly killed former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and 14 others. While the blast shattered the venue, it also ignited one of the largest, most relentless manhunts the subcontinent had ever seen.

At the center of this hunt was Packiachandran, better known by his nom de guerre Sivarasan—the mastermind dubbed the “one-eyed jack” due to a glass eye sustained in combat. By his side was backup bomber Shubha and a tight cadre of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) operatives. For nearly three months, this strike team slipped through naval blockades, crossed state lines, and disappeared into plain sight. Their final sanctuary was not the dense jungles of northern Sri Lanka, but an isolated, dusty suburb on the southern fringes of Bengaluru.

The Coromandel Seal and Inland Flight

Immediately after the detonation, Sivarasan, dressed in a white kurta-pyjama, blended into the screaming crowd and made his initial getaway. The LTTE’s original extraction plan was clear: slip back to the Tamil Nadu coastline, board speedboats across the Palk Strait, and report back to LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran in Jaffna.

That plan unraveled almost immediately. A local photographer named Haribabu, hired to document the hit, had died in the blast, but his camera miraculously survived intact. When the Special Investigation Team (SIT), led by D.R. Kaarthikeyan, developed the film roll, they found crystal-clear photographs of Dhanu, Shubha, and Sivarasan standing near the VIP enclosure. Within days, posters bearing Sivarasan’s face were plastered across police stations, railway stops, and bus depots throughout southern India.

Simultaneously, the Indian Navy and Coast Guard threw a multi-layered maritime blockade across the Tamil Nadu coast. Every fishing trawler, country boat, and shoreline cove was tracked. Sivarasan quickly realized that the sea route was a death trap. Instead of pressing eastward to the water, he decided to retreat inland, turning his attention to Karnataka, where the LTTE had spent years quietly cultivating logistical hideouts, clandestine medical facilities, and transit nodes.

The Iron Belly: Crossing State Borders

Crossing from Tamil Nadu into Karnataka presented an enormous logistical hurdle. Checkpoints along national and state highways were heavily fortified, with police scrutinizing buses, personal cars, and private taxis.

To bypass this dragnet, the LTTE relied on their network of local sympathizers and seasoned smugglers. The conspirators secured an empty fuel tanker truck. Sivarasan, Shubha, and five other cadres crawled into the suffocating, hollow interior compartments of the tanker. Encased in steel and breathing through improvised air inlets, the killers were hauled past state checkpoints, appearing to ordinary border guards as nothing more than a routine commercial transit.

By early August 1991, the tanker rolled into Bengaluru, depositing the fugitive unit deep inside Karnataka.

Bengaluru in 1991: The Quiet Haven

Today’s Bengaluru is a bustling global technology hub characterized by urban sprawl and chronic traffic. In 1991, however, the city was far gentler, known primarily as a pensioner’s paradise and an industrial outpost. Beyond its core areas lay wide, unpaved tracts of land, eucalyptus plantations, brick kilns, and isolated stone quarries.

Initially, the operatives moved across transient safe houses in urban neighborhoods like Indiranagar and Muthiyalpet. Yet, with posters of Sivarasan arriving in local newspapers, urban neighborhoods posed too great a risk of curious neighbors and delivery boys. Sivarasan demanded a secluded base where contact with the outside world could be reduced to almost zero.

LTTE facilitators found the ideal hideout in Konanakunte, a sparsely populated hamlet off Kanakapura Road on Bengaluru’s southern outskirts. They leased an unassuming, newly built single-story brick house surrounded by vacant plots and overgrown weeds. To the few locals living hundreds of yards away, the occupants were described as quiet, non-interfering tenants from out of town who worked long, odd hours.

Inside, life was rigid and monastic. The curtains were nailed shut. Lights were kept dim or extinguished. No one stepped out during daylight. Groceries, dry provisions, and kerosene were delivered by a solitary local contact who visited only under the cover of night. From this silent redoubt, Sivarasan maintained coded radio communications with Jaffna, desperately attempting to coordinate an alternate evacuation.

The Net Snaps Shut

While Sivarasan waited in silence, the SIT and Karnataka Police were dismantling the network from the outside in. Interrogations of key figures captured in Tamil Nadu yielded phone numbers, pager addresses, and names of couriers shuttling between Chennai and Bengaluru.

On August 17, 1991, police raided an LTTE hideout in Bengaluru’s Muthiyalpet. Caught off guard, several cadres bit into their potassium cyanide capsules. However, a local driver and an operative were apprehended before they could take their own lives. Under intense interrogation, they broke, handing over the precise location of the isolated house in Konanakunte.

By the evening of August 18, a joint contingent of Karnataka Police and SIT officers silently cordoned off the Konanakunte house. Maintaining a perimeter roughly 100 feet back, the forces refrained from an immediate assault. The orders from New Delhi were explicit: Sivarasan and Shubha were to be taken alive to expose the broader conspiracy. Because every operative carried a cyanide capsule around their neck, local authorities decided to wait for elite National Security Guard (NSG) commandos, who were flying in from Delhi equipped with non-lethal stun grenades and gas canisters.

The Midnight Standoff and the Cyanide Oath

For nearly 36 hours, a tense siege gripped the barren layout. The stalemate, however, was shattered by a bizarre accident. In the dead of night, an ordinary civilian truck carrying a load of timber wandered down the unpaved approach road and got stuck in the mud near the police perimeter. The driver repeatedly revved the loud diesel engine, spinning the wheels in an attempt to dislodge the truck.

To the paranoid operatives inside, the roar of the engine sounded like armored personnel carriers or police vehicles breaching the perimeter. Sivarasan kicked open the front door, wielding an AK-47 assault rifle, and sprayed bullets into the darkness before retreating inside and bolting the doors.

Inside the redoubt, the fugitives knew the end had arrived. Sivarasan burned all radio codebooks, personal documents, and financial records in a metal vessel. Then, the operatives enacted the LTTE’s ultimate pledge. Five cadre members swallowed their cyanide capsules. Sivarasan, determined not to risk surviving cyanide poisoning, drew a 9mm pistol, placed it against Shubha’s temple, and pulled the trigger. Turning the barrel on himself, he fired a single round through his own temple.

When NSG commandos breached the front door on the morning of August 20, 1991, they were met with dead silence. Scattered across the living room and bedroom floors lay the bodies of all seven operatives. The masterminds had cheated the courtroom, but the sprawling, high-stakes manhunt across southern India had finally reached its grim conclusion in the quiet dirt of Konanakunte.

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