Justice delayed.. definitely not denied! Nirbhaya case convicts hanged to death

New Delhi, March 20: And here's the justice.. serving not only the girl who was tortured on a moving bus in Delhi seven years ago, but whole of India that cried of shock after that night. Four of the Nirbhaya killers were hanged at 5.30 am on Friday. The pre-dawn execution took place less than two hours after the Supreme Court dismissed the final petition of the convicts.

 

Akshay Thakur, 31, Pawan Gupta, 25, Vinay Sharma, 26, and Mukesh Singh, 32, were hanged at Delhi's Tihar Jail, where they spent the last few hours in isolation in separate cells, barely eating. In the hours before that, the convicts had also petitioned the Delhi High Court, where their lawyer cited coronavirus for the lack of proper documents for a hurriedly-filed appeal.

 

 

"The convicts were woken at 3.30 am, around the time they learnt they had reached the end of the road in courts. They hardly slept and refused a last meal or any last wish", said the officials. One of them begged for his life as he was led to the gallows. The entire jail was on lockdown since last night, the officials added.

 

"We all have waited so long for this day. Today is a new dawn for daughters of India. The beasts have been hanged," said Asha Devi, the mother of the young woman who came to be known as "Nirbhaya" or fearless. After the Supreme Court's verdict, she went home and hugged her daughter's photo.

 

On December 16, 2012, the 23-year-old woman had watched a movie with her friend and boarded a private bus to reach home. Six men on the bus beat the friend unconscious before attacking the woman. For nearly an hour, the woman was subjected to a savage assault and tortured with an iron rod before being dumped for death. However, she survived long enough to identify her attackers but died a few days later in a Singapore hospital amid angry street protests across India and international revulsion.

 

The woman was studying physiotherapy and worked at a call centre. Her father worked as an airport baggage handler. Her killers lived in a slum in south Delhi. Of the six arrested, one, Ram Singh, was found dead in his jail cell and a minor who was just short of 18 was freed after three years in a reform home. Earlier this year, the government also asked the Supreme Court to make it harder for convicts in such brutal crimes to use legal loopholes to stall their sentence.