Yakub Memon Hanged on his Birthday

“My hanging has been politicised”. Now 59, Ajmera said the blast broke his ribs and forced him to undergo about 20 surgeries that have cost him thousands of dollars.

Yakub Memon’s defence team had hoped that he would be spared execution because he co-operated with the authorities.

“He normally never interacted with us”.

Crowd were seen cheering and shouting slogans “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, and taking selfies outside the Nagpur jail, according to journalist Rana Ayub.

Hours before the death, in a pre-dawn session of the Supreme Court, Justices Dipak Misra, Prafulla Chandra Pant and Amitava Roy heard Memon’s last plea for a 14-day stay on his execution to mentally prepare himself and meet with family.

Also added that it was not inclined to go into the issue of second mercy petition filed by Memon before the Maharashtra government after the dismissal of his curative petition on July 21.

He will be buried inside the Nagpur Central Jail complex, official sources said here.

Crowds deluged the street outside Memon’s home in central Mumbai, where his family was waiting to receive his body for burial.

Memon was hanged at a prison in Nagpur in the western state of Maharashtra.

It is not immediately clear if they would be permitted to attend the last rites. The legal battle continued till barely a few hours before his hanging.

The Home Minister said many people have lost their loved ones in 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai but the matter was looked into in details and after that this judgement came. However, death sentences of other 10 prisoners commuted to life imprisonments in 2013.

The court trial for the case began on June 6, 1995, and ended in January 2003 – one of the longest trials in the country.

Managing the reference, the court said that the corrective appeal to that “was chosen by the three senior-most judges can’t be viewed as void or unseemly” in connection of the rule that was set around this court in a prior judgment broadly known as Hurra 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 execution of Yakub Memon, the man convicted of financing the deadly 1993 Mumbai bombings, has divided opinions about India’s capital punishment laws. The ministry has returned the report to the President with a note there is no ground for a fresh mercy petition. Later at night, in an unprecedented hearing which saw the Supreme Court being opened up, three judges said Memon had been offered enough time and opportunity to challenge his sentencing, and that a last-minute petition by activists and lawyers was not valid.