Potential terrorists among those who attended Yakub’s funeral: Tripura Governor

In another, the 70-year-old governor said intelligence kepeing a tab on Memon’s mouners is preventing terror.

At an age of 53, Yakub might have happily spent with his family, seeing his daughter married and playing with the grandchildren and loving his wife, if he thought for a second before attacking and killing the people. “Ignoring the real and actual facts about the case, a person about whom there reportedly was no strong and credible evidence of having direct involvement in the supposed case has been put to death“, a Hurriyat spokesman said here.

For decades India had been reluctant to carry out death sentences, until it voted in 2012 against a UN draft resolution for a global moratorium on executions.

Terming the execution of Yakub as “miscarriage of justice”, CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury had said that India should join other nations and scrap the death penalty.

His party colleague and Thiruvananthapuram MP shared his sentiments and said, “Saddened by news that our government has hanged a human being”.

While Bajrangi and Kodnani are accused in the Gujarat riots, Lt Col Purohit and Swami Aseemanand are accused in the Malegaon blasts.

He, however, later added that he was not going into the merits of the Yakub case but was opposed “to the principle and practice of the death penalty in our country”.

The ruling BJP slammed the leaders opposed to the hanging, Tharoor and Digvijaya Singh were forsaken by the Congress as well, which said it was their “personal views”. “It is a cold blooded murder and we condemn it”, they said.

Shakeel also questioned the Supreme Court over its final decision which sealed Yakub’s fate in the end, the ToI reported.

Mohammad Yasin Malik, chairman of pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), while commenting on Memon’s execution said that a message has been sent across that “Indian judiciary is in a hurry when it comes to delivering verdicts against a particular community”.

Memon and two of his brothers were convicted in 2006 by a specially-designated court using controversial anti-terror legislation that was introduced after the 1993 attacks and is no longer on the statute books.

Raja’s resolution, meanwhile, said that “committing a crime is more a sociological than a legal problem”.