India’s supreme court has rejected a last minute plea by a 52-year old accountant, sentenced to death for the serial bombings that shook Mumbai in March 1993, killing 257 people and injuring over 800 others.
The top court's decision legally cleared the way for Yakub Memon's hanging before 7am local time on his birthday on Thursday at Nagpur central jail, western India, 840 km (520 miles) north of Mumbai.
India’s president Pranab Mukherjee also rejected, for the second time after April 2014, Memon’s mercy plea nine years after his conviction for providing financial and logistical support for 13 back-to-back bombings that ripped through Mumbai within hours.
In anticipation of the hanging, a professional hangman arrived at Nagpur jail last Friday to supervise preparations for the execution.
Jail authorities said that over the past week he has been conducting tests on the gallows, with a dummy replicating Memon’s weight and body size.
Reinforced security
The local authorities in Nagpur have, meanwhile, reinforced security around the jail in anticipation of trouble ahead of the hanging.
“The death warrant is legal and there is no infirmity in it” a three-judge supreme court panel declared, whilst rejecting Memon’s clemency plea.
Earlier, on July 21st, the court had rejected a similar appeal by Memon, who has spent over two decades in jail.
Eleven people were convicted for the 1993 bombings, which targeted the Bombay stock exchange, the offices of Air India, a five-star hotel and crowded bazaars in the port city in what was India’s first such deadly attack.
But Memon was the only one whose death sentence was upheld on appeal, while those of the 10 other accused was converted to life imprisonment.
Security officials said the bombings were executed by Mumbai’s Muslim-dominated underworld in retaliation for anti-Muslim riots in the city a few months earlier, in which over 1,000 people had died.
Memon’s brother Tiger is alleged to have masterminded the revenge attacks along with Mumbai’s underworld boss Dawood Ibrahim, both of whom are on the run.
They are believed to be hiding somewhere in Pakistan, under the patronage of its Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID), which India claims masterminded the Mumbai bombings.
Pakistan denies India’s claims.
Secret deal
Yakub Memon also left for Karachi days before the blasts occurred, and assisted by the ISID, he and his family alternated between this southern Pakistani port city and Dubai.
But in 1994 Memon retuned home, following a secret deal with Indian intelligence agencies, under which he provided documentation, photographic evidence and other information on the ISID’s role in Mumbai’s serial bombings.
Memon has been in jail for 21 years and, once executed, will be the fourth person to be hanged in India this century, although over 1,600 people have been on death row since 2000.
For nearly a decade India had observed an unofficial moratorium on executions, but that ended in November 2012 with the hanging of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman in the 2008 Mumbai terror strike.
Two months later, Mohammad Afzal Guru, was similarly executed for his involvement in the 2001 attack on India’s parliament complex.
Both hangings, however, unlike Memon’s were carried out secretly without public notice or fanfare.
