“Staying of Memon’s death warrant, issued by a lower court on April 30, would be travesty of justice”, the court said, while rejecting his appeal around 5 a.m. local time after a two-hour hearing, paving the way for his hanging as scheduled.
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“I have exhausted my remedies”, lawyer Anand Grover told reporters after the Supreme Court heard Memon’s final plea.
His body landed at Mumbai around 12.10 pm but the police banned filming or taking photographs of the body during transportation from the airport to the burial ground to avoid any breach of law and order.
Indian policemen stand guard in the neighbourhood of Yakub Abdul Razak Memon’s family residence in Mumbai, India, Thursday, July 30, 2015.
In the hours before the execution, a group of prominent lawyers contacted India’s chief justice to seek a postponement of Memon’s hanging for two weeks.
The gunman in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks was executed in 2012.
“The senior officer in-charge of the operation himself wrote that death sentence was not correct”, Karat said, referring to the late B. Raman, a former Research and Analysis Wing official, who favored clemency for Memon for cooperating with and helping the officials in their investigation.
As the lone death row convict in the Mumbai attack case was hanged at 7am amid tight security on his 53rd birthday, victims of the 1993 serial blasts expressed satisfaction with the verdict.
Yakub Memon’s crisp benevolence request to President Pranab Mukherjee says that the President ought to require some serious energy to choose the supplication and not settle on a choice overnight.
Yakub Memon was executed in India early Thursday after he was convicted in 1993 for taking part in the terrorist attacks that killed 257 people.
Memon, a chartered accountant, had left the country along with his wife just before the blasts.
Police consider Memon’s brother, “Tiger” Memon, and mafia don Dawood Ibrahim to be the masterminds behind the attacks, intended to avenge the destruction of an ancient mosque by Hindu zealots in 1992.
Memon was accused of being the “driving spirit” behind the dozen or so blasts that ripped through India’s financial capital Mumbai on 13 March 1993. Undoubtedly, the developments in this case over the years and the ultimate judgment will serve to constitute a significant portion of India’s judicial history.
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They also argued that the Maharashtra prison manual, which stipulates that there must be a seven-day gap between the rejection of a mercy petition and execution, has not been followed. The vast majority of the 100-150 death sentences handed down each year are eventually commuted to life in prison.
