Nirbhaya Case: The four men convicted in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case were finally hanged to death today at 5:30 PM. The pre-dawn execution took place less than two hours after the Supreme Court dismissed the final petition of the convicts.
Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Kumar Singh, were held guilty of gang-raping the 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a Delhi bus, so brutally that she died of her injuries a fortnight later.
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 along with the hurriedly-filed appeal. A third court had already declared that they had run out of all legal options of stopping their execution.
The apex court also dismissed Akshay Kumar's plea challenging the rejection of his second mercy petition by President Ram Nath Kovind, saying no ground was made out for a judicial review of the decision.
The four convicts were hanged at Delhi's Tihar Jail, where they spent the last few hours in isolation and separate cells, barely eating. For the first time in the history of India, four convicts were hanged at the same time.
The convicts were woken at 3.30 am, around the time they learnt they had reached the end of the road in courts.
With just hours to go for the execution and no legal hurdle left, Nirbhaya's mother Asha Devi said her daughter's soul will now rest in peace.
"Finally the convicts will be hanged. Now I will get peace," Asha Devi said.