NEW DELHI: Nearly 27 years after 13 people were killed and 38 injured in a blast at a busy Lajpat Nagar market in the national capital, the Supreme Court on Thursday handed down life sentences to four convicts for the remainder of their lives without remission, saying they executed an “international conspiracy” to “destabilize” India by carrying out the blast.
The court upheld the conviction of the two accused and restored the conviction of two other former death row convicts who were discharged by the Delhi High Court in 2012.
The bench comprising Justices B R Gavai, Vikram Nath and Sanjay Karol, in its 190-page judgment, spared the four convicts — Mohd Naushad, Mirza Nissar Hussain alias Naza, Mohd Ali Bhatt alias Killey and Javed Ahmed Khan — the gallows on the grounds of delay.
The bench in the verdict authored by Justice Sanjay Karol remarked that the blast at hand was not an isolated incident and it was in furtherance and a part of an international conspiracy to cause disruptive activities in India.
“The incident took place on May 21, 1996, the trial court awarded the sentence of death on April 22, 2010, more than 13 years ago; and the present accused acting at the behest of the principal conspirators -- are all mitigating circumstances in not awarding the sentence of death even though it falls within the category of the rarest of rare cases,” said the court.
“In view of the conspiracy, and mitigating circumstances as against the punishment of the death penalty, we consider it a fit case to award life imprisonment without remission, extending to natural life,” said the bench.