The Centre and the Delhi government moved the Supreme Court Wednesday challenging the rejection of their plea by the Delhi High Court against the trial court order staying the execution of four death row convicts in Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case.
Hours after the high court's verdict, the Centre and the Delhi government filed an appeal against it in the top court.
The high court said all the four convicts in the Nirbhaya case have to be executed together, not separately, and faulted the authorities concerned for not taking steps for issuance of death warrant after rejection of appeals of the convicts by the Supreme Court in 2017. The court gave one week to convicts to exhaust all legal remedies available to them.
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The court also said the procedure for the execution of the death warrant will be initiated once the court allotted week ends.
The trial court had on January 31 stayed "till further orders" execution of the four convicts in the case -- Mukesh Kumar Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Kumar Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar (31), who are lodged in Tihar Jail.
The 23-year-old physiotherapy intern, who came to be known as 'Nirbhaya' (fearless), was gang-raped and assaulted on the night of December 16, 2012, in a moving bus in South Delhi. She died of her injuries a fortnight later in a Singapore hospital.
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(With inputs from PTI)
