Nagpur:
The Supreme Court has rejected 1993 Mumbai blasts convict Yakub Memon's petition to stop his hanging.
As the court was about to begin a middle-of-the-night hearing of Yakub Memon's final plea against his execution, a police constable delivered a letter to his brother Suleiman at a hotel in Nagpur in Maharashtra.
The contents of the letter are not known, but there is speculation that it was a formal intimation to Memon's family that he would be hanged at the Nagpur Central Jail at 7 am on Thursday.
The general manager of the hotel confirmed that he had escorted the policeman to the fourth floor room where Suleiman Memon is staying and the latter signed for it. The time, he said, was 2.10 am.
On Wednesday evening, President Pranab Mukherjee rejected Yakub Memon's mercy petition against his death sentence in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case in which 257 people were killed.
Yakub's lawyers and activists then moved the Supreme Court pleading that there must be, according to the court's judgement in another case, a 14-day gap between the rejection of his mercy plea and the execution.
They also claimed that a Maharashtra prison manual, which provides for a seven-day gap between rejection of mercy petition and execution, has not been followed.
Yakub's brother Suleiman met him on Wednesday afternoon soon after the Supreme Court rejected a petition against his execution. "I have full faith in the judiciary. I have full faith in the almighty," Suleiman said, also requesting the media repeatedly to, "Please leave me alone."
In Nagpur, curfew has been imposed around the central jail. In Mumbai, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis met with the state's top cops to discuss law and order.
Yakub Memon, a chartered accountant who turns 54 today, was arrested in 1994 and was in 2007 found guilty of both plotting the attack and executing the 1993 blasts. His brother "Tiger" Memon is the main accused in the case along with underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, and is missing since 1993.