At 5.30 am on Friday, the four convicts in the Delhi December 16 gangrape and murder case — Mukesh (31), Pawan Gupta (24), Vinay Sharma (25) and Akshay Kumar Singh (33) — were hanged inside Tihar’s Jail Number 3. The four were hanged a day after the Supreme Court, the Delhi High Court as well as a lower court in the Capital rejected their pleas seeking a stay on their execution.

After rejection of their plea in lower court, the High Court had heard the matter till past midnight.
When the high court too turned them down, the counsel of three of the four convicts, advocate A P Singh, headed back to the Supreme Court, which finally upheld their execution around 3.30 am on Friday.

Welcoming their execution, the victim’s mother said, “I am proud of my daughter, I couldn’t save her and that is a regret I’ll always have. If she was alive today, I would have been known as a doctor’s mother. Justice was denied but, finally, it happened. I thank the judiciary, our President, and our governments.”

After the four had been left hanging for 30 minutes, Delhi Prisons D G Sandeep Goel said a doctor had examined them and they were declared dead at 6.22 am. Their bodies were sent to Delhi’s Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital for post-mortem.

In the last-minute appeal in the Supreme Court, A P Singh sought “permission for the family of Pawan and Akshay to meet them”. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, after checking with officials, said the jail manual didn’t allow it.

The Supreme Court Bench of Justices R Banumathi, Ashok Bhushan and A S Bopanna took up Pawan’s plea at 2.30 am, dismissing it an hour later. The hangman, Pawan Jallad, brought from Meerut, was paid Rs 15,000 for each hanging. A large crowd waited outside Tihar from early morning, holding the Tricolour and placards seeking justice. As the announcement came of their deaths, the crowd burst into slogans of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’.

The victim’s mother said the family “will continue fighting for the daughters of India”. “If such a crime happens to a woman or a girl in your family, then first extend support to the woman,” she said. Mukesh, Pawan, Vinay and Akshay, along with two others, had been convicted of the rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student inside a moving bus on December 16, 2012. She died 13 days later in a Singapore hospital of wounds received in the brutal assault.

The incident had led to nationwide protests, and paved the way for landmark changes in the rape law.
Of the two others convicted, one was a juvenile at the time and released after serving the maximum sentence of three years in a remand home, while another, Ram Singh, died of reported suicide in Tihar Jail in 2013.

The hearing on the execution of death warrants against the four had gained pace last year, after the victim’s mother moved an application to shift the case from a vacant court, where the matter remained unheard for months. The death warrants had been stayed three times earlier over pending appeals by them.

The last last hanging was carried out in Tihar in 2013, of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. It was the first time four men were hanged together inside the prison complex.