Plea in Delhi court to issue death warrant to Nirbhaya convicts

New Delhi: The Delhi government on Wednesday moved a city court seeking fresh date for the execution of four Nirbhaya case convicts.

President Ram Nath Kovind rejected the mercy petition of Pawan Kumar Gupta, one of the four men facing the gallows in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case, a Home Ministry official said earlier in the day.

The trial court had on February 17 issued fresh date for execution of death warrants for March 3 at 6 am for the four convicts  Mukesh Kumar Singh (32), Pawan (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31)  in the case.

The matter is likely to be taken up for hearing shortly by Additional Sessions Judge Dharmendra Rana.

However, a 'complete' mercy petition of convict Akshay Singh Thakur was recently filed claiming that the previous one, which was rejected by the President on February 5, did not have 'complete facts'.

Meanwhile, Pawan Gupta's curative petition seeking commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment was also dismissed by the Supreme Court on Monday.

The case pertains to the brutal gang-rape and killing of a 23-year-old paramedical student in a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012, by six people including a juvenile in Delhi. The woman had died at a Singapore hospital a few days later.