Four convicts will be hanged together for the first time in India. A wider scaffold is being prepared.
To prepare for the execution on January 22 of four convicts sentenced to death for the 2012 gang-rape and murder of Nirbhaya, a "dummy execution" will be carried out at Delhi's Tihar jail soon, a statement said on Wednesday.
Convicts Pawan Gupta, Akshay, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh Singh will be hanged at 7 am on January 22, a Delhi judge declared yesterday, signing a death warrant.
Four convicts will be hanged together for the first time in India. A wider scaffold is being prepared.
A "dummy execution", which involves testing the gallows using weights, will be carried out in Jail 3 of Tihar, where the convicts will be executed.
"Tihar to conduct dummy execution in coming days but not today. It will be done in jail 3, where the execution will take place," said the jail administration in a statement quoted by news agency ANI.
For the drill, officials of the Public Works Department, the jail superintendent and other officials will be present, it said.
Jail cell 3 was where Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru was hanged in 2013. The hangman will be called from Uttar Pradesh.
Until the hanging, the four convicts will be in solitary confinement. They will be allowed a last meeting with a family member.
In one of the worst crimes that India has seen, a young medical student was gang-raped and tortured with an iron rod on a moving bus before being dumped on the road on December 16, 2012. Amid outrage and street protests across the country, she died on December 29. Six men were arrested.
Ram Singh, one of the main accused, was found hanging in his jail cell. The sixth man, who was months short of 18 at the time of the incident, was released after three years at a reform home.