Yakub Memon buried with Islamic rites

Yakub Memon, who was hanged in Nagpur jail on Thursday, was buried alongside his father’s tomb.

His body was handed over to his family members in Mumbai.

Memon, 1993 Mumbai blasts convict, was hanged at 6.35 am after the Supreme Court dismissed his curative petition and President Pranab Mukherjee rejected his mercy petition on July 29.

Hours before his hanging, Memon offered namaz and read the holy Quran and was provided with a fresh set of clothes.

Nagpur’s Chief judicial magistrate M M Deshpande was present and she read out the operating part of the TADA court order which awarded capital punishment to Memon before he was made to stand on a stool and the lever pulled by the hangman.

A team of doctors declared him dead and a post-mortem was conducted by a team from a Nagpur hospital.

Ironically, Memon, who was a chartered accountant by profession, was hanged on his birthday. He turned 53 today.

He had reacted with an angry outburst saying "innocent people are being called terrorists" when a TADA court here had pronounced him guilty on September 12, 2006.

After hearing the verdict, he had said, "We do not want to engage lawyers to argue on quantum of sentence...13 years have passed and innocent people are being called terrorists."

Blasts in Mumbai, then known as Bombay, in 1993 had killed 257 people and Memon was convicted as the "driving spirit" behind the serial blasts in India's financial capital.

(Image: Indiatimes)