Seven years after a young medical student was gang-raped and tortured on a moving bus in Delhi, four of her killers were hanged at 5.30 am on Friday morning. Less than two hours ago, the Supreme Court, in a hearing past midnight, dismissed their final petition, bringing to an end a case that changed a nation.
In the hours before that, the convicts had petitioned the Delhi High Court, where their lawyer cited coronavirus for the lack of proper documents with the hurriedly filed appeal.
A third court had already declared that they had run out of all legal options of stopping their execution.
Akshay Thakur, 31, Pawan Gupta, 25, Vinay Sharma, 26, and Mukesh Singh, 32, were hanged at Tihar Jail in Delhi, where they spent the last few hours in isolation and separate cells. This is the first time in the history of India that four convicts were hanged at the same time.
They refused to eat and were up all night, said officials. The entire jail was on lockdown through the night, and officials said, no other prisoner in Asia's largest jail could sleep a wink.
The convicts were taken out of their cells at 3.30 am.
The four filed multiple petitions over the past few months, managing to stall their execution thrice at the eleventh hour. "Send them to the India-Pakistan border, send them to Doklam, but don't hang them," pleaded the lawyer of one of the convicts Akshay Thakur.
"We all have waited so long for this day. Today's dawn will be a new dawn as my daughter will get justice. It will also be a new dawn for daughters of India," said Asha Devi, the mother of the young woman who came to be known as "Nirbhaya" or fearless. "My daughter's soul will be at peace."