A court in Delhi on Thursday ruled that the four convicts in the 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder case would be executed at 5.30am local time on March 20, PTI reported. The court said Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Mukesh Singh and Pawan Gupta have exhausted all their legal options.
This is the fourth death warrant issued by the court. The death warrants were first issued for January 22, and then postponed to February 1 because of the mercy pleas filed by two of the convicts. After this, they were scheduled to be hanged at Tihar Jail in Delhi on March 3.
On Monday, the court had stayed their execution till further orders. Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana had deferred the matter after Gupta filed the mercy petition before Indian President Ram Nath Kovind earlier in the day. His lawyer had requested the court to stop the execution citing the petition.
Kovind on Wednesday rejected Gupta’ mercy petition.
The four men, along with two others, raped and brutally assaulted a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving bus in Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012.
The woman succumbed to her injuries two weeks later at a hospital in Singapore. The gangrape triggered huge protests in the Capital and across the country.
One convict died in prison, while a minor convict was sent to a detention home for juveniles and was released in December 2015.