Nirbhaya Case: Doctors declare convicts to be dead after pre-dawn execution

Doctor declared all the four convicts in the Nirbhaya case dead after they were hanged at Tihar Jail, an official said. According to the official, their bodies remained suspended in the air for nearly half-an-hour. Mukesh Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) were executed at 5.30 am for the brutal assault in an empty moving bus on the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern who came to be known the world over as Nirbhaya, the fearless one.

"Doctor has examined and declared all four dead," Director General of Tihar Jail Sandeep Goel said. Four men convicted in the 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder case were hanged in the darkness of pre-dawn on Friday, putting an end to the seven-year-long case. Following the executions, jail officials notified that for the first time in Tihar jail's history, four men were executed simultaneously. 

READ| Nirbhaya rapists hanged: Four men executed together for the first time in Tihar's history

South Asia's biggest prison complex, Tihar jail houses over 16,000 inmates. The hanging was carried out as per schedule on Friday morning after a three-judge Supreme Court bench rejected the final plea by the convicts' lawyer AP Singh to stay their execution in a late-night hearing. On Friday, hundreds of people gathered outside Tihar jail, holding placards and banners and raising slogans in support of the hanging of the convicts. Security outside the jail had been tightened. The victim's parents -- mother Asha Devi and father Badrinath Singh -- hailed the hanging saying that their daughter had finally got the justice, over seven years after she was brutalised in a moving bus in the national capital.

Nirbhaya Case

The four convicts, along with two others including Ram Singh and a juvenile, had raped and brutally tortured a 23-year-old paramedic student on a moving bus in south Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012. The victim died a few days later after battling for life at Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital and later at a Singapore hospital. The case had created an uproar across the country, especially in Delhi where a large number of people came out on the streets, demanding justice for the victim, who was renamed as 'Nirbhaya' or the fearless. 

READ| Chronology of Nirbhaya case

(With agency inputs)