Yakub Memon: India executes former accountant for role in Mumbai bombings amid

There was tight security around the Nagpur prison on Thursday morning, and in parts of the state capital, Mumbai.

However, his brother Tiger Memon and underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, who masterminded the blasts, are on the run since the terror strikes which were carried out allegedly to avenge the killing of Muslims in riots a few months earlier.

As Yakub’s death sentence divided public opinion, the issue stirred Chief Justice of India H.L. Dattu to action after a battery of lawyers rushed to his residence after midnight with a petition for an urgent hearing.

“This execution will not deliver justice for the 1993 Mumbai blasts“, said Amnesty International’s India director, Aakar Patel.

Memon was executed on his 53rd birthday after President Pranab Mukherjee rejected Memon’s clemency on Wednesday for a 14 day delay on his execution so he could prepare for death and bid his goodbye to his family.

Prison officials said Memon’s last wish to talk his daughter was fulfilled hours before the hanging. “If you feel this was also rushed, then I think it should take 30 or 40 years for death sentences to be given”, he said. Yakub filed a petition saying that correct procedure was not followed in his case.

Rohatgi rejected calls to scrap the death penalty, invoking the threat of terrorism just days after militants killed six people in the state of Punjab, near India’s restive border with Pakistan.

The bench also said the dismissal of curative petition by the senior most judges of the Supreme Court was correct.

Kirti Ajmera, a stockbroker who was severely injured in the bombing at the stock exchange, said hours before Memon was hanged that he supported the decision.

The blasts were seen as revenge for the demolition of a medieval mosque in northern India by Hindu nationalists.

Yakub, brother of prime accused Tiger Memon, was the only one of 11 blast convicts to have his death sentence upheld on appeal with all others given life imprisonment.

Amid evidence that capital punishment has failed to serve as an effective deterrent against terror or crime, the objective of the Law Commission’s discussions was to recommend whether to retain the death penalty or modify the conditions under which it would be applied. But there are debates on how to define that and the only executions in recent years have been of convicted terrorists.

On November 21, 2012, Ajmal Kasab, the only terrorist to have survived the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, was hanged in Pune’s Yerwada Jail.

Security has been stepped up in Mumbai, especially in Mahim area where Yakub’s family resides as well as other sensitive localities of the metropolis, and over 400 people have been detained as a preventive measure.