NE NEW SERVICE
NEW DELHI, JAN 17
President of India Ram Nath Kovind on Thursday rejected a mercy plea filed by Mukesh Singh, one of the four convicts in the Nirbhaya case, barely hours after it was forwarded to him by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The petition, which represented Mukesh Singh’s final appeal before his execution, was filed on Tuesday after the Supreme Court dismissed the curative petitions, the last legal appeal filed by him and Vinay Sharma, another convict.
Vinay Sharma, Mukesh Singh, Akshay Kumar Singh and Pawan Gupta were to be hanged at Delhi’s Tihar Jail at 7 am on January 22, the trial court judge had declared last week, signing a death warrant seven years after a young medical student was gang-raped on a moving bus, tortured and killed.
However, on Thursday, five days before the scheduled execution Tihar officials asked for a new date, saying the executions could not take place till after all mercy pleas were settled.
The three other convicts have yet to file their respective mercy petitions, following the rejection of which a convict is given a 14-day period of reprieve before the execution.
Mukesh Singh and Vinay Sharma’s last legal appeal against their death sentence, a curative petition was dismissed by a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Nirbhaya’s mother, fearing more delay in the execution of the four men, said she had been going to many courts for years but wanted justice now. “If they have rights, we too have the right to justice for our daughter who was killed seven years ago,” she said.
On December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old medical student was gang-raped and tortured on a moving bus before being dumped on a road in south Delhi. The woman, who came to be known as “Nirbhaya”, died on December 29 in a Singapore hospital.
Six men were arrested for the horrifying assault. A fifth accused, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jail during the trial and the sixth man, a few months short of 18 at the time of the incident, was released after three years in a reform facility.
