New Delhi:  Seven years after a young medical student was gang-raped and tortured on a moving bus in New Delhi, a crime that shocked India, four of her killers were hanged at 5.30 am at Tihar Jail today. The pre-dawn execution took place less than two hours after the Supreme Court dismissed the final petition of the convicts.

In the hours before that, the convicts had also petitioned the Delhi High Court, where their lawyer cited Coronavirus for the lack of proper documents for a hurriedly-filed appeal. Akshay Thakur, 31, Pawan Gupta, 25, Vinay Sharma, 26, and Mukesh Singh, 32, were hanged simultaneously at Delhi’s Tihar Jail, where they spent the last few hours in isolation in separate cells, barely eating.

The entire jail was on lockdown since last night and few other prisoners in Asia’s largest prison facility could sleep a wink ahead of the first execution since 2015.

The convicts were woken at 3.30 am, around the time they learnt that they had reached the end of the road in courts. 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 (at the border with China), but don’t hang them,” pleaded Akshay Thakur’s lawyer A.P. Singh.

‘Beasts have been hanged’

“We all have waited so long for this day. Today is a new dawn for daughters of India. The beasts have been hanged,” said Asha Devi, the mother of the young woman who came to be known as “Nirbhaya”.

On Dec. 16, 2012, the 23-year-old woman had watched a movie with her friend and boarded a private bus to reach home. Six men on the bus beat the friend unconscious before attacking the woman. For nearly an hour, the woman was subjected to a savage assault and tortured with an iron rod before being dumped naked, bleeding and her intestines spilling out. 

She survived long enough to identify her attackers but died a few days later in a Singapore hospital amid angry street protests across India.

Of the six arrested, one, Ram Singh, was found dead in his jail cell and a minor who was just short of 18 was freed after three years in a reform home.

Justice has prevailed: PM Modi

Justice has prevailed,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted after the hanging. “Justice has prevailed. It is of utmost importance to ensure dignity and safety of women. Our Nari Shakti has excelled in every field. Together, we have to build a nation where the focus is on women empowerment, where there is emphasis on equality and opportunity,” the Prime Minister tweeted.