Rafiq Maqbool/AP India’s Bharatiya Janata Party activists supporting death penalty of 1993 Mumbai blasts accused Yakub Abdul Razak Memon, are stopped by police Wednesday during a protest in Mumbai, India.
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The 53-year-old blasts conspirator was hanged in Nagpur Central Jail at 7 am, the Chief Minister, who also holds the Home portfolio, informed the Lower House.
Yakub Memon was put to death after his latest appeal for clemency was rejected by India’s Supreme Court.
While India has put more than 1,000 people on death row in the past decade, the nation has actually executed only three, the BBC noted Thursday.
A series of 13 explosions had rocked the country’s commercial capital on March 12, 1993, in which 257 people were killed and 713 injured, besides property worth Rs 27 crore was damaged.
In the days before his execution, it emerged that Memon had helped Indian intelligence crack the case and establish a link to neighbour and arch-rival Pakistan over the bombings.
The report on midday.com says that Memon’s remarks were made on Wednesday when the apex court was deciding whether his death penalty had been correctly upheld by its judges.
The 1993 serial were allegedly carried out to avenge the killing of Muslims in riots, a few months earlier.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty global, have decried the hanging.
The court accepted the government lawyer’s argument that Memon had enough time to appeal against the president’s decision, when he had last year rejected his first mercy plea, which was filed by one of his brothers on his behalf. Rohatgi said the whole exercise was an attempt to prolong Memon’s stay in jail and get the sentence commuted.
“Yakub’s every option has now [been] exhausted”, Soli Sorabjee, a senior lawyer and India’s former attorney general, told reporters after the court ruling.
Meanwhile, safety has been tightened outdoors the fear assault convict’s Mumbai residence following his execution. “The issuance of death warrant is not illegal and thereby we don’t find any merit in the convict’s petition“, the panel said, dismissing Memon’s petition before a packed courtroom. India needs to strengthen their law and order and forget about the execution. It ended in November 2012, with the execution of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. “If you feel this was also rushed, then I think it should take 30 or 40 years for death sentences to be given”, he said.
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Sashi Tharoor, a former UN undersecretary and a high-profile member of India’s parliament, tweeted today after the hanging, which took place in the city of Nagpur, that, “There is no evidence that death penalty serves as a deterrent: to the contrary in fact”.
