India Executes 1993 Mumbai Bomber After Rejecting Mercy Plea

Yakub Memon was hanged at a prison in the western state of Maharashtra at around 6.30 a.m. local time, Indian Home Ministry spokesman Kuldeep Dhatwalia told CNN Thursday. Yakub Abdul Razak Memon declared terrorist and chartered accountant, who is convicted over his involvement in the 1993 Bombay bombings by Special Terrorist and Disruptive Activities court on 27 July 2007.

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.

Others pointed out that one of his brothers, Tiger Memon, was alleged to have masterminded the attacks, along with Mumbai gang boss Dawood Ibrahim. India’s attorney general argued Memon was misusing the justice system by filing repeated mercy petitions.

Security has been boosted in the area of Mumbai where Memon used to live in case of intercommunal violence. The sentences for the others were commuted to life imprisonment.

While the public backs Memon’s execution several lawmakers and retired judges have come out in his support saying the sentence is too harsh in light of the help he gave investigators in cracking India’s deadliest bomb attack case. Seven family members, including two women, accompanied Yakum Memon’s body to Mumbai.

Executions are only rarely carried out in India, but President Pranab Mukherjee has rejected a number of mercy pleas in the past three years, ending a de facto eight-year moratorium.

Prison officials said Memon’s last wish to talk his daughter was fulfilled hours before the hanging.

Human rights groups, including Amnesty worldwide, have decried the hanging.

All India Majlis-e-Itttehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi demanded the government to exhibit equal vigour, as it exhibited in executing Yakub Memon, to punish the perpetrators of Gujarat communal riots and Sikh riots in Delhi. In an appeal to maintain peace and harmony to ensure law and order in Maharashtra, Fadnavis exercised caution as he made the statement on Memon’s death sentence after the funeral was over.

In 2006, popular Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt was also convicted of acquiring illegal weapons tied to the Mumbai bombings.

The blasts went off in Mumbai on March 12,1993. Two months later, Mohammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri convicted in a deadly 2001 attack on India’s Parliament complex, was hanged.

A man accused of organising a series of bomb attacks in India which left 257 people dead has been hanged.

In the meantime reports suggest that his body was sent for an autopsy in the jail hospital by a medical team from a Nagpur government hospital, before being cleared for the last rites.