Mumbai blasts convict Yakub Memon hanged to death

About 300 prominent citizens, including at least eight retired judges of the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court, had urged India’s president to commute Memon’s sentence to life in prison, reflecting what appears to be growing uneasiness in India with the death penalty.

The apex court had set up the three-judge bench on Tuesday after a two-judge bench had delivered a split verdict on the petition of Memon, the lone death row convict in the blasts, who had sought a stay of his execution scheduled for July 30.

Memon was hanged at Nagpur jail in the western state of Maharashtra around 7:00 a.m. on the day of his 53rd birthday, according to the NDTV and CNN-IBN news channels, after last-ditch pleas for clemency were rejected by India’s president and supreme court.

“I have exhausted my remedies”, lawyer Anand Grover told reporters in New Delhi at dawn after the Supreme Court heard Memon’s final plea.

Yakub – the younger brother of prime absconding accused Tiger – played an important role in the world’s first ever serial bombings in which 257 people were killed and more than 700 were seriously injured.

Memon was convicted as the “driving spirit” behind the serial blasts in India’s financial capital Mumbai, then known as Bombay.

Wednesday night and the early hours before the execution were filled with drama as the Supreme Court held an unprecedented overnight special hearing at 3.20 am local time (9.50 GMT) over Yakub Memon’s request for a 14-day reprieve.

For almost a decade, India had an unofficial moratorium on executions.

Amnesty India said before Yakub’s execution it was disappointed by the decision to go ahead with the hangings.

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. Thursday’s editorial titled “Inhumane and unconscionable” states that the time has come to end the debate around death penalty and take “the moral position that there shall be no death penalty on the statute book, regardless of the heinousness of the offence, the circumstances or the number of fatalities involved”. He was brought to a Mumbai court to face trial a year later. His burial is expected later Thursday, and hundreds of police and paramilitary soldiers were positioned near the Muslim cemetery where it will take place. Memon was found guilty of providing support for the bombings but always denied having any knowledge of the plot, allegedly carried out by his older brother.

He was originally sentenced to death in 2007 as a key conspirator behind 12 blasts that ripped through several hotels, marketplaces and buildings in Mumbai on March 12, 1993. The court sentenced him to death.

One of the letter displayed Memon depicted himself as a “decent native of this nation” who “attempted to help the legislature in whatever little way that [he] could”.