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Standing at attention more than halfway along the path were two khaki-uniformed security men wearing the traditional beards and turbans that identified them as Sikhs. One of them, Beant Singh, was a favorite of Mrs. Gandhi's: she had known him for ten years. Only two months earlier, when Mrs. Gandhi was asked if she could trust Sikh guards in the wake of her controversial decision to have the Indian army root out Sikh extremists at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikhs' holiest shrine, she had glanced at Beant Singh and said, "When I have Sikhs like this around me, then I don't believe I have anything to 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.
The two men 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.
The two Sikhs then calmly dropped 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.
When she first heard the shots in the garden below, Rajiv's wife Sonia rushed frantically down a flight of stairs screaming, "Mummy! Oh, my God, Mummy!" Already, guards were starting to pick up Mrs. Gandhi's body, her orange sari soaking in blood. Led by her longtime personal assistant, R.K. Dhawan, they carried her to her white, Indian-made Ambassador car. Sonia cradled Mrs. Gandhi's head in her lap as the auto sped off to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences hospital, a short distance away.
Ustinov and his crew, who had not been close enough to witness the shooting, rushed to the Prune Minister's bungalow. "It was a scene of confusion," he said. "The security men were still running around, shaken and unbelieving. One minute there was gunfire, and afterward the birds in the trees were singing. The security men kept us there for five hours, polite all the time, but they wanted to be sure we didn't have something on film that they could use as evidence. Sadly, we did not."