Four men convicted of a gang rape and murder that stunned India were hanged yesterday.
The quartet were executed in New Delhi, more than seven years after the brutal attack on the women and her male friend.
Jyoti Singh, 23, was returning home from the cinema in Delhi when a group of six men attacked her on a private bus on the evening of Sunday, December 16, 2012. The assailants, allegedly including a man who died before being convicted, and a boy, knocked out her friend and dragged Ms Singh to the back of the vehicle, where they raped and assaulted her with a metal rod.
After an ordeal lasting more than an hour, she and the friend were dumped and left for dead.
Four of the men on the bus – Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta, who did menial jobs and lived in a slum in south Delhi – died yesterday in the high-security Tihar prison, following a series of legal appeals lasting years.
Ms Singh – dubbed ‘Nirbhaya’ (‘fearless one’) by the Indian media – survived long enough to identify her attackers but died a fortnight later in a Singapore hospital.
Police tracked down the driver of the bus and arrested him and three others on December 18. The remaining two were arrested within a week.
The five adults and one juvenile were charged with 13 offences in February 2013 by a fast-track court.
A month later, one of them – Ram Singh – was found dead in his prison cell in March 2013. Officials said he killed himself, but his family and lawyer alleged he was murdered.
That August, the juvenile, aged 17, was found guilty of rape and murder and sentenced to three years in a correctional facility.
The four remaining adults were found guilty and sentenced to death the following month.
But it took more than six more years until they were hanged after a series of legal appeals.
Ms Singh, who was studying physiotherapy and worked at a call centre, had moved from a rural area and is one of a huge number of reported rape victims in India.
Nearly 34,000 cases were reported in India in 2018, but the real figure is thought to be far higher, with many more victims scared to come forward.
The case provoked huge and often violent demonstrations involving tens of thousands of people in Delhi and elsewhere.
The government has since introduced harsher penalties for rapists and the death penalty for repeat offenders.
India is among a dwindling group of nations that still uses capital punishment.
Yet in 2018, according to Amnesty International, it recorded its highest number of death penalties in nearly two decades – a total of 186.
And at the end of 2019 there were 378 people on death row, according to the National Law University.
However, executions are rarely carried out, with the last taking place in 2015 over bomb attacks in Mumbai in 1993.
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