India has carried out the execution of four men convicted of the 2012 Delhi bus gang rape and murder of a young woman. The execution took place in the capital’s high-security Tihar prison at dawn on Friday, March 20th. The convicted men, Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, and Mukesh Singh, had been sentenced to death by hanging in a 2013 trial, but their execution had been delayed several times due to appeals.
Hundreds of people gathered outside the prison gates as the execution was carried out, with chants of “death to rapists” heard among the crowd. Delhi chief minister Arwind Kejriwal remarked, “It took seven years but justice was delivered.”
The victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student referred to as Nirbhaya, meaning fearless, was gang-raped on a moving bus and left for dead on a roadside in December 2012. She passed away in a hospital in Singapore two weeks after the attack. The incident led to the arrest of six individuals, including one who was found dead in jail in 2013, and another who was released in 2015 after serving the maximum term possible for a juvenile in India.
Nirbhaya’s mother, Asha Devi, who had campaigned for her daughter’s murderers to be hanged, expressed her gratitude towards the judiciary and government, stating, “Today is dedicated to daughters of the country.” Nirbhaya’s father added, “Our wait for justice was painful and agonizing.”
This marks the first instance of capital punishment being carried out in India in five years.