With less than a week to live, Mumbai bombing accused keeps on fighting

The impending execution of Yakub Memon, scheduled for July 30, has triggered a storm of protest in India, writes Samanth Subramanian.

Yakub Memon, pictured here on October 25, 2007, is due to be executed on July 30. Kunal Patil/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

NEW DELHI // Yakub Memon has less than a week to live, but he hasn’t stopped fighting.

On July 30 – his birthday – India plans to hang Memon, now 52, for his involvement in a series of bomb blasts that rocked Mumbai in 1993. Two hundred and seventy-three people were killed and hundreds injured.

But, in a last ditch petition filed with India’s Supreme Court, Memon has argued that the death sentence issued to him by a lower court is illegal.

The impending execution has also triggered a storm of protest in India. "There's an impression, even among people who are rationalistic about this, that what's being done to him is wrong," Pradyuman Maheshwari, a Mumbai-based political analyst, told The National.

Media commentary has reinforced this view. On Wednesday, The Hindu newspaper wrote in an editorial that with the actual masterminds of the bombings absconding outside India, the execution of Memon "will only give the impression that the lone man available among the many brains behind the ghastly act of terrorism is being singled out."

Memon will be the first person, among more than a hundred individuals convicted for participating in the bombings, to be executed. Several others were given death sentences that were later commuted to terms of life imprisonment.

But despite a cycle of appeals, Memon, who was sentenced to death in 2007 by a special antiterrorism court set up to try the Mumbai bombing suspects, has not been able to overturn the decision to execute him.

“Crimes such as these deserve maximum punishment,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “But we

believe that the maximum punishment should not be the death penalty because it is inherently inhumane.”

Memon, born and brought up in Mumbai, was once an accountant. But he was also the younger brother of Ibrahim “Tiger” Memon, a Mumbai gangster. The elder Memon and another gangster named Dawood Ibrahim have been named as the two prime suspects behind the bombings.

Prosecutors have argued that Yakub Memon assisted his brother and Ibrahim in handling their finances, which paid for sending operatives to train in Pakistan and purchasing explosives.

Soon after the bombings, the Memon family left Mumbai for the Pakistani city of Karachi. But in 1994, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) claimed that it arrested Memon in a railway station in New Delhi.

Memon has always claimed differently. In a letter to a judge, written from his prison in 1999, he claimed he was “a good citizen of this country”. During his time in Pakistan, he wrote, he had grown tired of that country’s continuous monitoring of his family.

Memon claimed that he gave himself up willingly to Indian authorities during a trip to Nepal, handing over a suitcase full of evidence against other conspirators. He was happy to face trial, hoping to remove the stigma attached to his name.

It was unfair of the state to link him to the crime just because of his brother, he wrote in the letter. “The prosecution is harping upon ‘Memon Family’ during their arguments as if ... a family can be treated as a single unit.”

Prosecutors contended that Memon had full knowledge of the attacks when they were being planned, and that he had travelled to Dubai to meet Ibrahim and other co-conspirators to fine-tune the details of the bombings. But Memon has denied this.

The case against Yakub Memon grew somewhat flimsier when the confessions of several of his co-accused, who had implicated him, were later retracted, on the grounds that they were made under coercion.

But Memon was still sentenced to death, and he appealed his conviction in the Supreme Court. When the Supreme Court upheld his conviction, he filed a mercy petition with president Indian Pranab Mukherjee, hoping to escape the death penalty. Last year, Mr Mukherjee rejected this petition as well.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected yet another petition from Memon – a so-called “curative” petition, which entitles a person to relief after a final judgement. On the same day, Memon filed a different mercy petition, this time with the governor of Maharashtra, where he is jailed.

The petition to the Supreme Court, filed on Thursday, argues that the death warrant against Memon – which orders and sets the date for his hanging – was invalid because it was issued before he had exhausted all of his legal remedies, such as the curative petition. Memon’s lawyers have based this line of argument on an earlier observation along these lines by the Supreme Court.

The debate around Memon has grown more complicated after news website Rediff.com on Thursday carried a previously unpublished article by B Raman, once the head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research & Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency.

Raman, who died two years ago, said in the column that Memon had co-operated with Indian investigating agencies after he was arrested.

Memon’s assistance “and his role in persuading some other members of the family to ... surrender constitute, in my view, a strong mitigating circumstance to be taken into consideration while considering whether the death penalty should be implemented,” Raman wrote.

Memon’s execution, Mr Maheshwari said, “felt incorrect because it damned the person who has helped you out, just because he’s Tiger’s brother”.

Unlike with the execution of Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist arrested and convicted for his participation in the November 26, 2008, attacks on Mumbai, “there’s no public pressure for Memon to be hanged,” Mr Maheshwari said. “There’s no outrage here in Mumbai.”