The judges had rejected Yakub Memon's mercy plea in an eleventh hour ruling, after Supreme Court had unprcedentedly been opened at night.
As Yakub Memon was hanged today in a Nagpur jail, security has been added for the three judges who rejected his last-minute appeal in an unprecedented hearing that took place in the Supreme Court in the middle of the night.
Justices Dipak Misra, Amitav Roy and Prafulla Pant spent two hours starting at about 3 am weighing the new petition before they ruled they would not stop his execution at 7 am.
The judges said that Memon had ample time and opportunity to challenge his death sentence before yesterday, and that he had exhausted all legal options available to a death row prisoner.
Memon was convicted in 2007 as the "driving spirit" of the deadly attack in Mumbai in 1993 in which 257 people were killed as bombs exploded back to back in landmarks across the city including the Stock Exchange. In 2013, the Supreme Court upheld his death sentence. A mercy petition filed by his brother on his behalf was turned down by President Pranab Mukherjee.
The date of hanging was set for July 30. In the last three days before he was executed, Memon's lawyers, helped by activists, explored a series of routes to stop his hanging. They said the Supreme Court had wrongly confirmed his death sentence before he had exhausted all his legal options; yesterday, Memon filed a fresh clemency appeal in his own name with the President; when it was rejected, he asked for a 14-day delay. But the judges said stopping his execution would have been "a travesty of justice."
His body was brought by his family to Mumbai where he was buried today.
Memon was convicted for financing the terror attacks that were masterminded by his older brother Tiger and Dawood Ibrahim, both of whom remain missing. His lawyers and activists said that he had cooperated wholly with investigators and did not deserve to die. Families of those who were injured or killed in the terror attack strongly disagreed.