The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a notice to the Central Bureau of Investigation asking the agency to explain why it had not verified allegations of a larger conspiracy behind former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991 despite an order from a Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act Court. The apex court’s queries were based on statements made by one of the convicts in the case, AG Perarivalan, reported The Hindu.

Perarivalan’s counsel Rajeev Dhavan told the Bench of justices Ranjan Gogoi and L Nageshwara Rao that the Chennai-based court had directed the agency to look into the “left out area” of the earlier investigation into the case.

“What was followed by the CBI was a ‘Boom Theory’, i.e. there is a death followed by an investigation into the reported boom and a trial focusing on the boom. But they have not gone into whether there was a larger conspiracy,” Dhavan said, adding that the case needs to be investigated again, the English daily reported.

During earlier hearings in lower courts, Perarivalan had asked for case records of the investigation conducted by the CBI’s Special Investigation Team and Multi Disciplinary Monitoring Agency. He had alleged that there was a conspiracy that went beyond the role of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s role in the assassination and that the CBI had not followed the court’s direction.

Gandhi was assassinated on May 21, 1991, by a suicide bomber in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai. Perarivalan, along with convicts Murugan, Santhan, Nalini Sriharan, Robert Pious, Jayakumar and Ravichandran, is serving a life term for assassinating Gandhi.