WORLD ‘Beasts are hanged’

Celebration as Delhi gang-rape perpetrators meet final justice

INDIA executed four men yesterday for the gang-rape and murder of a woman on a Delhi bus in 2012 that sparked huge nationwide protests and international revulsion.

The four were hanged before dawn at Tihar Jail in the Indian capital in India’s first use of capital punishment since 2015.

The brutal attack on Jyoti Singh sparked weeks of demonstrations and shone a spotlight on the alarming rates of sexual violence and the plight of women in India.

Capital punishment appears to enjoy widespread support in the world’s biggest democracy, and the execution sparked small celebrations outside the prison yesterday.

“We are satisfied that finally my daughter got justice after seven years,” the victim’s mother Asha Devi said outside the jail. “The beasts have been hanged.”

Singh, 23, was returning home from the cinema with a male friend on the evening of December 16, 2012, when they boarded a Delhi bus, thinking it would take them home.

Five men and a 17-year-old boy had other, darker ideas.

They knocked the friend unconscious and dragged

Singh to the back of the bus and raped and tortured her with a metal rod.

The physiotherapy student and the friend were then dumped on the road. Singh died 13 days later in a Singapore hospital from massive internal injuries.

“A decent girl won’t roam about at 9pm,” one of the perpetrators later told a BBC documentary.

Nearly 34,000 rapes were reported in India in 2018, according to official data.

But Singh’s ordeal, and the fact that she was part of a generation of young women trying to break out of a still very traditional society, struck a chord.

“It was like the bursting of a dam,” said Kavita Krishnan, a women’s activist. “It was not restricted to seeking revenge ... There was a social awakening.”