Attack At about 9:20 a.m.
Indian Standard Time on 31 October 1984, Gandhi was on her way to be interviewed by British actor
Peter Ustinov, who was filming a documentary for
Irish television. She was accompanied by her personal secretary
R. K. Dhawan, personal security officer Rameshwar Dayal, and Constable Narayan Singh. She was walking through the garden of the Prime Minister's Residence at No. 1 Safdarjung Road in New Delhi towards the neighbouring 1 Akbar Road office. Gandhi was not wearing her
bulletproof vest that day, which she had been advised to wear at all times after Operation Blue Star. Gandhi passed a
wicket gate guarded by
Constable Satwant and
Sub-Inspector Beant Singh, and the two men opened fire. Beant fired three rounds into her abdomen from his .38 () revolver; Satwant Singh was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for killing Gandhi. He was hanged in 1989, along with accomplice
Kehar Singh.
Salma Sultan gave the first news of the assassination of Gandhi on
Doordarshan's evening news on 31 October 1984, more than ten hours after she was killed. It is alleged by the Indian government that Gandhi's secretary R. K. Dhawan overruled intelligence and security officials who had ordered the removal of policemen as a security threat, including her assassins. Beant was one of Gandhi's favourite guards, whom she had known for ten years. Satwant was 22 years old at the time of the assassination, and had been assigned to Gandhi's guard just five months earlier. She was declared dead at 2:20 p.m. The postmortem examination was conducted by a team of doctors headed by
Tirath Das Dogra, who stated that 30 bullets had struck Gandhi from a
Sterling sub-machine gun and a revolver. The assailants had fired 33 bullets at her, of which 30 had hit; 23 had passed through her body, while seven remained inside. Dogra extracted bullets to establish the identity of the weapons and to correlate each weapon with the bullets recovered by ballistic examination. The bullets were matched to the weapons at CFSL Delhi.
National mourning The Indian government ordered a
national mourning from 1 to 12 November with flags half-masted and cancelled entertainment and cultural events and closed offices for several days.
Tanzania declared seven days of mourning,
Uganda five, and
Cuba four.
Pakistan,
Vietnam,
Brazil,
Nicaragua and
Gabon each declared three days of mourning.
Portugal declared two days of mourning,
Yugoslavia,
Bulgaria,
Cyprus,
Mongolian People's Republic and
Mauritius declared a day of national mourning.
Funeral Gandhi's body was taken in a
gun carriage through Delhi roads on the morning of 1 November to
Teen Murti Bhavan, where her father stayed and where she lay in state. ==Aftermath==