India Tomorrow
NEW DELHI, MARCH 20 – Seven years after a young medical student was gang-raped and tortured by six people on a moving bus in Delhi, four of her killers were hanged at 5.30 am on Friday at the Tihar Jail here. While the fifth accused Ram Singh committed suicide in Tihar jail, the six one identified as Mohammed Afroz was a juvenile and released after three years of sentence. He is currently working as a cook somewhere in South India.
The pre-dawn execution took place less than two hours after the Supreme Court dismissed the final petition of the convicts. Delhi Prisons DG Sandeep Goel confirmed Mukesh (31), Pawan Gupta (24), Vinay Sharma (25) and Akshay Kumar Singh (33) were executed at 5.30 am. They were sentenced to death for the rape and brutal assault of a 23-year-old woman in a moving bus in the national capital on December 16, 2012.
Jail officials said the bodies were kept hanging for half an hour, a mandatory procedure after execution as per the prison manual.
This is the first time that four men have been hanged together in Tihar Jail, South Asia’s largest prison complex that houses more than 16,000 inmates. The executions were carried out after the men exhausted every possible legal avenue to escape the gallows. Their desperate attempts only postponed the inevitable by less than two months after the first date of execution was set for January 22.
In last-gasp attempts,the convicts knocked on the doors of the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court just hours before the hanging. Hours before the execution, Pawan Kumar Gupta approached the Supreme Court challenging rejection of the second mercy petition by the President.
In an unprecedented late-night hearing that began at 2.30 AM and lasted an hour, a Supreme Court bench dismissed his last plea, paving the way for the execution. It also refused to pass any direction allowing Gupta and Akshay Singh to meet their family members just before they are sent to the gallows.
Relieved that their daughter finally got justice after a seven-year-long legal struggle, the victim’s parents said they will continue their “fight for India’s daughters”.
On December 16, 2012, the 23-year-old woman had watched a movie with her friend and boarded a private bus to reach home. Six men on the bus beat the friend unconscious before attacking the woman.
For nearly an hour, the woman was subjected to a savage assault and tortured with an iron rod before being dumped for dead, naked, bleeding and her intestines spilling out. She survived long enough to identify her attackers but died a few days later in a Singapore hospital amid angry street protests across India and international revulsion.
The woman was studying physiotherapy and worked at a call centre. Her father worked as an airport baggage handler. Her killers lived in a slum in south Delhi.
