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Yakub Memon

NEW DELHI. — India’s top court yesterday rejected a final appeal by Yakub Memon, a key plotter of a series of bomb attacks that killed hundreds in Mumbai two decades ago, paving the way for his execution.

Media reports said Memon would hang on July 30 — more than two decades after the deadliest attacks ever to hit India — after the Supreme Court rejected his final plea.

The Bombay Stock Exchange, the offices of Air India and a luxury hotel were among targets of the March 1993 blasts, which killed 257 people in India’s western business hub. The attacks were believed to have been staged by Mumbai’s Muslim-dominated underworld in retaliation for anti-Muslim violence that had killed more than 1 000 people.

Executions are only carried out for “the rarest of rare” cases in India.

But President Pranab Mukherjee has rejected a number of mercy pleas in recent years, ending an unofficial eight-year moratorium.

A Kashmiri separatist convicted of involvement in a deadly 2001 attack on the Indian parliament was executed in New Delhi in 2013 while the lone surviving gunman from the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks was hanged in 2012. — AFP