53-year-old was the sole convict of 1993 Bombay blasts who has been given death penalty.
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Yakub Memon was hanged to death in Nagpur central Jail early in the morning.
The last ditch attempt by Yakub Memon’s lawyers to delay the inevitable started a sequence of high-voltage midnight drama, starting from the Supreme Court registry travelling to residence of Chief Justice of India and attaining finality after a pre-dawn 90-minute hearing at Court no. 4 that sealed his fate on his 53rd birthday.
The apex court said there was no “legal fallacy” in the issuance of death warrant by the TADA court in Mumbai on April 30 scheduling Yakub’s execution for Thursday, the day he turns 53, in Nagpur’s Central jail.
The case has aroused controversy because police considered Memon’s brother, “Tiger” Memon, and mafia don Dawood Ibrahim to be the masterminds behind attacks designed to avenge the destruction of an ancient mosque by Hindu zealots in 1992.
Later, the Indian security forces found an unattended auto – being used by the planters, but abandoned when they panicked – in Worli area of Mumbai. His brother Tiger Memon told Yakub that he was welcome to return to India if he wanted to become a Mahatma.
“The wounds inflicted on March 12, 1993, can be healed only by justice – but what the hangman offers is only a crude approximation of that cherished ideal”.
“India’s use of the death penalty demeans that most cherished idea on which our republic rests, the idea of justice”, the editorial said.
Memon’s wife Raheen and 21-year daughter Zubeida had also arrived in the city late Wednesday and were at an unknown location. A total of 100 people have been convicted of involvement in the blasts.
He was the only one of 11 people convicted for the bombings to have his death sentence upheld on appeal.
One of India’s lengthiest trials, which included 686 witness testimonies that filled 13,000 pages, opened on June 6, 1995, and ended in January 2003. “The time has come to end this debate once and for all by ascending to a moral position that there shall be no death penalty on the statute book”, it argues. The others were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Quick Response Teams of police, formed after the 26/11 terrorist attacks, have been deployed at a few places, including the Al Hussaini building, where the Memon family lives.
Memon’s case in particular has divided public opinion in India.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty global, have decried the hanging.
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For almost a decade, India had an unofficial moratorium on executions. His body has already been handed over to his family members who will bury him in Mumbai. Two months later, Mohammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri convicted in a deadly 2001 attack on India’s Parliament complex, was hanged.
