Four Nirbhaya Convicts To Be Hanged Together In Tihar Jail No 3; UP Likely To Provide Executioner

The four convicts in the Nirbhaya case will be executed in Jail No 3, a senior Tihar Jail official said on Tuesday, hours after a Delhi court issued death warrants against them and declared that they will be hanged at 7 am on January 22.

Three of the convicts are lodged in Jail No 2, while one is in Jail No 4, the official said.

Reports say the jail authorities will approach a hangman in Meerut to carry out the execution.

"We will seek service of a hangman from Meerut. We have proper arrangements at the jail to execute all the four convicts together," a Tihar jail official told ANI. He added that one hangman was enough to execute the hanging.

The court order was pronounced by Additional Sessions Judge Satish Kumar Arora who issued the death warrants against the four death row convicts -- Mukesh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31).

The court interacted with all the convicts through video conferencing from Tihar jail.

The 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, was gang raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012 inside a moving bus in south Delhi by six persons before being thrown out on the road.

She died on December 29, 2012 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

On July 9 last year, the apex court had dismissed the review pleas filed by the other three convicts in the case, saying no grounds have been made out by them for review of the 2017 verdict.

One of the six accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail.

A juvenile, who was among the accused, was convicted by a juvenile justice board and was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term.

The top court in its 2017 verdict had upheld the capital punishment awarded to them by the Delhi High Court and the trial court.

(With agency inputs)