[DAWN] India's top court on Tuesday rejected a final appeal by Yakub Memon, a key plotter of kabooms that killed hundreds in Mumbai in 1993, paving the way for his execution.Media reports said Yakub Memon would hang on July 30 -- more than two decades after the deadliest attacks ever to hit India --after the Supreme Court rejected his final plea.
The Bombay Stock Exchange, the offices of Air India and a luxury hotel were among the targets of the March 1993 blasts, which killed 257 people in India's commercial capital.
The attacks were believed to have been staged by Mumbai's Moslem-dominated underworld in retaliation for anti-Moslem violence that had killed more than 1,000 people.
Memon was the only one of 11 people convicted for the 1993 attacks to have his death sentence upheld on appeal. The sentences on the others were commuted to life imprisonment.
Executions are only carried out for "the rarest of rare" cases in India.
But President Pranab Mukherjee has rejected a number of mercy pleas in recent years, ending an unofficial eight-year moratorium.
A Kashmiri separatist convicted of involvement in a deadly 2001 attack on the Indian parliament was executed in New Delhi in 2013, while the lone surviving gunman from the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks was hanged in 2012.
"Crimes such as these deserve maximum punishment," Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch
... During the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011, HRW received a pledge from the Foundation to Promote Open Society, of which George Soros is Chairman, for general support totaling $100,000,000. The grant is being paid in installments of $10,000,000 over ten years.Through June 30, 2013, HRW had received $30,000,000 towards the fulfillment of the pledge....
, told AFP.
"But we believe that the maximum punishment should not be the death penalty because it is inherently inhumane," she said.