India hangs 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts plotter Yakub Memon on his birthday

Yakub Abdul Razak Memon, the only death row convict in India’s deadliest terror attack, the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed 257 people, was hanged Thursday on his birthday after the country’s president rejected a last-minute mercy plea.

Memon was executed inside a prison in western India where he had been incarcerated since 1994.

 An accountant, Memon was convicted in 2007 of helping raise funds for the serial blasts that rocked the financial capital. By late Wednesday Memon finally exhausted all the legal avenues open to him in order to escape the death penalty.

 Yakub’s older brother Ibrahim, or “Tiger,” Memon and Dawood Ibrahim, both leading gangsters in Mumbai in the 1990s, are the main suspects in the bombings, seen as revenge for the destruction of a 16th century mosque by Hindu nationalists. Both have fled the country.

 Prominent citizens, including retired Supreme Court judges, had urged President Pranab Mukerjee to commute Memon’s sentence to life in prison. That appeal reflected both opposition to the death penalty as well as fresh claims by his lawyers that he freely surrendered to Indian authorities in Kathmandu, Nepal, and that his direct links to the bombings had not been sufficiently established.

 Indian investigators, along with the main public prosecutor in the case, Ujjwal Nikam, say he was arrested in New Delhi.