New Delhi, Mar 13 (NDTV): The Delhi High Court has confirmed death sentence for four men convicted by a trial court of the fatal gang-rape of a 23-year-old medical student in December, 2012.
Mukesh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan and Akshay Thakur were given the capital punishment by the lower court in September last year for the gang-rape of the young woman on a moving bus. She died of her injuries nearly a fortnight later in a Singapore hospital.
The court had said that the crime, which stirred widespread protests over sexual crimes against women in the country, fell into the judicial system's "rarest of rare category" that allows capital punishment.
The four filed appeals in the High Court, seeking to overturn the verdict, with the defence arguing that the men had been falsely implicated.
The convicts are being held at the capital's high-security Tihar Jail.
The fifth suspect in the case, bus driver Ram Singh, died in prison in March last year in an apparent suicide.
A sixth member of the group, who was a minor at the time of the assault, was sentenced to three years in a reformatory, the maximum penalty allowed under the country's juvenile laws.
India had an unofficial eight-year moratorium on capital punishment until last November, when the only surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai militant attacks was executed.
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