Dead bodies of Nirbhaya case convicts shifted to DDU Hospital for autopsy

After the four convicts in the 2012 Delhi rape and murder case were hanged to death in Tihar jail on March 20 pre-dawn, the dead bodies were shifted to DDU Hospital for autopsy. Mukesh Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) were executed at 5.30 AM for the brutal assault in an empty moving bus on the 23-year-old.

A five-member panel of DDU forensic-led by Dr. BN Mishra will be conducting the autopsy in camera. The doctor declared all the four convicts in the Nirbhaya case dead minutes after their execution. "Doctor has examined and declared all four dead," Director General of Tihar Jail Sandeep Goel said.

READ| Nirbhaya rapists hanged: Four men executed together for the first time in Tihar's history

South Asia's biggest prison complex, Tihar jail houses over 16,000 inmates. The hanging was carried out as per schedule on Friday morning after a three-judge Supreme Court bench rejected the final plea by the convicts' lawyer AP Singh to stay their execution in a late-night hearing. On Friday, hundreds of people gathered outside Tihar jail, holding placards and banners and raising slogans in support of the hanging of the convicts. Security outside the jail had been tightened. The victim's parents -- mother Asha Devi and father Badrinath Singh -- hailed the hanging saying that their daughter had finally got the justice, over seven years after she was brutalised in a moving bus in the national capital.

Nirbhaya Case

The four convicts, along with two others including Ram Singh and a juvenile, had raped and brutally tortured a 23-year-old paramedic student on a moving bus in south Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012. The victim died a few days later after battling for life at Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital and later at a Singapore hospital. The case had created an uproar across the country, especially in Delhi where a large number of people came out on the streets, demanding justice for the victim, who was renamed as 'Nirbhaya' or the fearless.  

READ| Chronology of Nirbhaya case

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(With PTI inputs)