Gallows today for Nirbhaya rapists
After exhausting all legal remedies, all the four convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case will be hanged by neck till death at 5.30 am on Friday in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. This is the first time that four men will be hanged together in South Asia’s largest prison complex that houses more than 16,000 inmates. The last hanging in Tihar was on February 9, 2013 when Afzal Guru, a resident of Sopore in north Kashmir, was executed at 8 am and buried on the prison premises for his role in the terror attack on Parliament.
The decks for the execution of the four convicts — Mukesh Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar (31) — were cleared on Thursday after their lawyers could not get any reprieve from sessions court, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court.
Additional sessions judge Dharmender Rana refused to grant them any relief and rejected the petition saying no valid ground has been brought to his notice to justify the stay of execution of their death warrants.
The execution of the four had been deferred thrice as the convicts had been moving from one court to another to exhaust legal remedies available to them.
“I am of the considered opinion that the application is bereft of merits. No valid ground has been brought to my notice to justify the stay of execution of death warrants. The application is accordingly dismissed,” the sessions court judge said in his order.
After the pronouncement of the order, Nirbhaya’s mother Asha Devi said her daughter's soul will now rest in peace and she had got justice seven years after the gruesome gangrape and murder that shook the nation.
“Finally the convicts will be hanged. Now I will get peace… The morning of March 20 will be the morning of our lives… If at all there is any chance, I want to see them (convicts) dying).”
Even Nirbhaya (fearless), in her dying declaration made in front of a magistrate on December 21, 2012, eight days before she died, had stated: “I want them (convicts) to be hanged so that no other criminal can do this kind of torture and ill-treatment to any other girl. In fact, such criminals should be burnt alive.”