The four convicts in the Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case -- Mukesh Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) -- were finally hanged to death just before dawn at Delhi's Tihar Jail. The convicts had approached the Supreme Court hours after before their execution after the Delhi High Court and lower court dismissed their pleas to stay the execution.

At around 4.30 am in the morning, the Supreme Court also rejected their plea for the grounds raised by them had already been dealt with by the court. "We all have waited so long for this day. Today is a new dawn for daughters of India. The beasts have been hanged," said Asha Devi, the mother of Nirbhaya.

Nirbhaya

They were hanged inside jail no. 3 of Tihar Jail at 5:30 am and their bodies were kept hanging for 30 minutes. At 6:22 am, a team of prison doctors examined the bodies and declared all the four convicts dead. The bodies will not be sent to Delhi's Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital for the post-mortem. After the autopsy, their bodies will be handed over to their respective families

The last few hours of convicts

The four convicts barely eat and slept and spent their last few hours in isolation. Officials said that they refused to eat anything and were awake much of the night. Their counsel, meanwhile, was running from one court to the other but their pleas were dismissed. At 3.30 am, the convicts were woken by the jail officials and this was the time the convicts learned that their end was inevitable now.

Nirbhaya gang-rape convicts

Earlier, they had managed to postpone their hanging thrice at the eleventh hour. "Send them to the India-Pakistan border, send them to Doklam (at the border with China), but don't hang them," pleaded the lawyer of one of the convicts.

Their hanging has brought to a close a keenly watched case. The incident, which took place on the night of December 16, 2012, had shocked the country and the world. The case prompted India to change its criminal laws against sexual offences and made women's safety a priority.

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