Nirbhaya case: Convicts' bodies handed over to families for last rites

Bodies of the four Nirbhaya gang rape and murder convicts were handed over to their respective families for last rites on Friday after the post-mortem was conducted at the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital here, jail officials said.

Mukesh Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) were executed Friday at 5.30 am for the savage assault in a moving bus on a 23-year-old paramedical student who came to be known the world over as Nirbhaya, the fearless one.

Jail officials said the bodies were kept hanging for half an hour, a mandatory procedure after execution as per the prison manual.

"After the doctor examined the bodies and declared all four dead, they were sent to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital for the post-mortem. Later, their bodies were handed over to their families," Director General of Tihar Jail Sandeep Goel said.

According to a senior jail official, Akshay's body will be taken to his village at Aurangabad in Bihar.

"The family members of Mukesh will take his body to Rajasthan. The bodies of Vinay and Pawan will be shifted to their houses at Ravidas Camp in south Delhi," they said.

Earlier, their family members rushed to DDU hospital for the necessary paper work before conducting the post-mortem.

There were elaborate security arrangements at the hospital, especially near the mortuary. No person, except the hospital staff and the relatives of convicts, was allowed near the mortuary.

This is the first time that four convicts have been hanged together in Tihar Jail, South Asia's largest prison complex that houses more than 16,000 inmates.

After raping and brutalising Nirbhaya, the men, one of whom was a juvenile at the time, dumped her on the road and left her for dead on the cold winter night. Her male friend who was with her was also severely beaten and thrown out along with her.

She was so severely assaulted that doctors who attended to he in hospital described her injuries as unprecedented. She died in a Singapore hospital after battling for her life for a fortnight.