India hangs bomb plotter Yakub Memon

Senior Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan on Thursday questioned the “unseemly hurry” behind the execution of Yakub Memon saying no time was given to the 1993 Mumbai blasts convict to challenge the rejection of his mercy petition.

Memon was hanged on his 54th birthday at a jail in the western Indian state of Maharashtra’s city of Nagpur around 7 a.m. local time and was pronounced dead by a government doctor, barely two hours after the apex court rejected his last-minute plea to stay his hanging, an official said.

In a dramatic sequence of events, a Supreme Court panel held an unprecedented hearing in the early hours of Thursday, before rejecting Memon’s last-ditch plea for a 14-day delay in execution.

Police consider Memon’s brother, “Tiger” Memon, and mafia boss Dawood Ibrahim to be the overall masterminds behind the attacks.

As a last attempt, Yakub Memon lawyers tried to save Yakub, by filing a special petition at around 11.50 pm yesterday. She read out the operating part of the TADA court order which awarded capital punishment to Yakub Memon before he was made to stand on a stool and the lever pulled by the hangman. Apparently, in the same year i.e, 2005, more than 1,200 death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Raman who coordinated Memon’s arrest in 1994 and said the prosecution appeared to have failed to highlight mitigating circumstances in its eagerness to secure a death penalty. Couple of days ago, even actor Salman Khan dragged himself into controversy for speaking in favour of the convict Yakub Memon.

In an interview to Karan Thapar on India Today television channel, Rohatgi, who contested Memon’s plea, said that submitting a mercy petition on the eve of the execution was wrong and Memon should have done it in April 2014 when his mercy petition was rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee. The 1993 bomb blasts led to death of 257 people and injured at least 712 people. Memon turned 53 on 30 July, the day he was executed.

Amnesty India described the execution as “cruel and inhuman”.

In 2006, popular Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt was also convicted of acquiring illegal weapons tied to the Mumbai bombings. His body was handed over to his family and flown to Mumbai by an air ambulance for the funeral rites. But it has carried out only three executions in the last decade, all in terrorism cases.

The Financial Express reported earlier that Shaina NC of the Bharatiya Janata Party said: “1993 blast victims have been waiting for so many years for this trial”. Then, On February 9, 2013, Afzal Guru who was the convict in the 2001 Parliament attack case was hanged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.