2012 gang rape verdict: The men who killed the Delhi braveheart
Death sentence to the four convicts of December 16 Delhi gang rape has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Another accused was found dead in 2013 and the juvenile was freed in 2015.
The men, who brutally attacked a 23-year-old paramedical student and gang-raped her on a moving bus on December 16, 2012, will be hanged to death. In that “devastating hour of darkness” as the Supreme Court put it on Friday, the five men and a juvenile not only brutalized the woman but the conscience of an entire nation.
They were a bunch of uneducated neighbours from a slum cluster in south Delhi’s RK Puram ruthlessly oblivious to the ways and rules of a growing city. As they wait for the gallows, here is a look back at who they are:
Akshay Thakur (32)
He is a school dropout from Aurangabad district in Bihar convicted for raping the woman. He is married with a two-year-old son. His family had been claiming that he was at home on that night.
Mukesh Singh (31)
He was the cleaner of the bus and hit the woman and her friend with an iron rod on board the bus. In an interview from jail for a BBC documentary aired in 2015, Singh had said that women who went out at night had only themselves to blame if they attracted the attention of gangs of male molesters.
Pawan Gupta (23)
A fruit-seller, Gupta took turns to rape the woman and assault her friend. Youngest of the four convicts, Pawan is pursuing graduation from inside Tihar Jail.
Vinay Sharma (25)
He drove the bus when the other four men and a juvenile raped the woman. He then gave the wheel to Mukesh to take turn to rape her. Lodged in Tihar Jail, Sharma filed an application in the court saying that he was beaten up “very badly” by five or six inmates of the jail in 2015. He added that he feared a risk to his life as some other convicts had “openly” issued murder threats to him.
OTHER ACCUSED
Ram Singh (33)
He was the driver of the bus, known to be notorious for caring little for law. Elder brother of Mukesh Singh, he attacked the woman with an iron rod causing her intestines to spill out. In December 2013, he was found hanging in his cell at Tihar Jail. He was the first one to be caught on December 17, 2012. When the police nabbed him, he was sitting in the same bus where his bloodstained clothes were also found.
The Juvenile
Now 23 years old, the juvenile was tried by the Juvenile Justice Board for raping and assaulting the woman . He was released after he completed his term in December 2015. He works as a cook at a dhaba somewhere in south India.
