India’s top court has rejected a final appeal by Yakub Memon, a key plotter of bomb attacks that killed more than 200 people in Mumbai in 1993, paving the way for his execution.
Media reports on Tuesday said Yakub Memon would hang on July 30 after the Supreme Court rejected his final plea, more than two decades after the deadliest attacks ever to hit India.
Crimes such as these deserve maximum punishment. But we believe that the maximum punishment should not be the death penalty because it is inherently inhumane
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch
The blasts targeted the Bombay Stock Exchange, the offices of Air India and a luxury hotel, and left 257 people in India’s commercial capital dead.
The attacks were believed to have been staged by Mumbai’s underworld in retaliation to anti-Muslim violence that had killed more than 1,000 people.
Memon was the only one of 11 people convicted for the 1993 attacks to have his death sentence upheld on appeal. The sentences on the others were commuted to life imprisonment.
Executions are only carried out for “the rarest of rare” cases in India, but President Pranab Mukherjee has rejected a number of mercy pleas in recent years, ending an unofficial eight-year moratorium
