MUMBAI: Former designated Tada judge who tried, convicted and sentenced Yakub Memon and sent him to the gallows for his role as a conspirator and planner of the March 12, 1993 bomb blasts on Sunday told TOI that the "theory of surrender was never established.''Judge Kode said, "Yakub never gave any details of the surrender or details of any deal offered to him." He said he had never accepted the surrender theory but instead the "arrest of Yakub by CBI was established and accepted." The judge who was elevated as judge of Bombay high court from where he retired recently said that question of the intelligence officer Raman stating in an article that there was a deal, may not hold evidentiary value unless the document is examined under the law of evidence. He said, "The argument that Yakub surrendered was not established in law, nor was the surrender date immediate to have qualified as an act of repentance or remorse. There was no explanation on oath. It was calculated and lacked details...who were these people with who he had bargained a deal?"But the Memon's family's hopes are now again pinned on the Supreme Court which is scheduled to hear his plea for a stay on the July 30 execution fixed by the state in Nagpur prison where he has been lodged since 2007 when he was sentenced.His plea in the SC is that his mercy plea before the governor is made by him personally and hence on more reasoned grounds as opposed to the one made by his brother Suleiman before the President after the SC had confirmed his death sentence in 2013. The President had rejected the mercy plea in May 2014. The President is not required to assign reasons for the rejection and the family and their friends are now questioning why that should be so even as Yakub says that the death warrant was issued in violation of the 14-day notice guidelines since it was issued to him even before the curative plea was rejected. ||||| NEW DELHI (AP) — Ignoring pleas and petitions by civil society groups, India on Thursday hanged an accountant convicted of supporting the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed 257 people in the country's worst terrorist attack. 
 
 An Indian police officer stops a family at a barricade in the neighborhood of Yakub Abdul Razak Memon's family residence in Mumbai, India, Thursday, July 30, 2015. Memon, 53, the only death row convict... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Sept. 18, 1993 photo, Yakub Abdul Razak Memon, right, is taken back to a jail in a police vehicle after he was allowed to visit his Mahim residence in Mumbai, Maharashtra state, India. Memon,... (Associated Press) 
 
 An Indian man reads a newspaper with the headline “Memon’s Death Sentence” as he sits at a bus stand in Hyderabad, India, Thursday, July 30, 2015. Memon, 53, an Indian accountant and the only person sentenced... (Associated Press) 
 
 An ambulance carrying the body of Yakub Abdul Razak Memon stands at Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar airport as it waits to transport Memon's body to Mumbai from Nagpur, India, Thursday, July 30, 2015. Memon, 53,... (Associated Press) 
 
 Indian Muslims offer special prayers to Yakub Abdul Razak Memon, after their daily late afternoon prayers in the old city of Hyderabad, India, Thursday, July 30, 2015. Memon, 53, an Indian accountant... (Associated Press) 
 
 Social activists condemn the hanging of Yakub Abdul Razak Memon, in New Delhi, India, Thursday, July 30, 2015. Memon, 53, an Indian accountant and the only person sentenced to death for his role in the... (Associated Press) 
 
 The police barred media from publishing images of Yakub Abdul Razak Memon's funeral, apparently fearing a backlash against the execution that many said was driven by politics. 
 
 Executions are rare in India and in the last decade only two others have taken place, both of terror convicts like Memon. 
 
 The earlier two executions were conducted in extreme secrecy and announced only after the fact. Their bodies were not handed to their families, but were buried inside prison compounds. 
 
 Memon's body was handed to his family and the police order banning media photos and video appeared at the last minute and poorly thought out. 
 
 Several journalists were informed only through Whatsapp after the funeral procession started. And while media was gagged, the funeral was captured on scores of cellphone cameras. By Thursday evening there were photos on Facebook that people claimed were from the funeral. 
 
 Memon was executed on his 53rd birthday at the prison in western India where he had been incarcerated since 1994. His family took his body to Mumbai from Nagpur hours later, and thousands of people gathered outside the cemetery for the funeral. Security was tight and hundreds of paramilitary and police were posted nearby. 
 
 His lawyers had mounted a last-ditch effort to save him, including arguments at the Supreme Court just two hours before the sentence was carried out. 
 
 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. 
 
 "I have exhausted my remedies," lawyer Anand Grover told reporters after the Supreme Court heard Memon's final plea. "I only hope that Yakub Memon will have a dignified death." 
 
 Attorney General Mukul Rohtagi said: "There's no question of victory. I've just done my job." 
 
 Memon was convicted in 2007 of helping raise funds for the blasts that struck the Bombay Stock Exchange, Air India offices, a state transport office, three hotels, a gas station and a movie theater over two hours on March 12, 1993. The attacks were seen as revenge for the demolition of a medieval mosque in northern India by Hindu nationalists. 
 
 The demolition sparked religious riots in many parts of the country, leaving more than 800 people dead, most of them Muslims. 
 
 Yakub's older brother Ibrahim — also known as "Tiger" Memon — and Dawood Ibrahim, both leading gangsters in Mumbai in the 1990s, are the main suspects in the bombings and have fled the country. A total of 100 people have been convicted. Death sentences were issued for 10 of them but were commuted to life in prison. 
 
 One of India's lengthiest trials, which included 686 witness testimonies that filled 13,000 pages, opened on June 6, 1995, and ended in January 2003. The judgments began in late 2006. 
 
 As Mumbai woke up to the news of the hanging, scores of police gathered near the Memon family home and cordoned off the area. Police were also stationed at the various places in the city where the bombs had exploded. 
 
 Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have decried the hanging. 
 
 India's legal system allows for executions in what the Supreme Court calls "the rarest of the rare cases." But the definition is debated and the only executions in recent years have been of convicted terrorists. The vast majority of the 100-150 death sentences handed down each year are eventually commuted to life in prison. 
 
 For nearly a decade, India had an unofficial moratorium on executions. It ended in November 2012, with the execution of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Two months later, Mohammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri convicted in a deadly 2001 attack on India's Parliament complex, was hanged. ||||| Over the past week, as the execution approached, a robust debate erupted here over whether Mr. Memon deserved to die. That debate gathered strength on Wednesday as India’s president rejected his final plea for mercy. By late Wednesday night, several hundred people opposed to Mr. Memon’s execution had gathered for a candlelight vigil at Jantar Mantar, a giant sundial that is this city’s preferred rallying point for public protest. Not until 5 a.m. on Thursday did India’s Supreme Court deny Mr. Memon’s final appeal. 
 
 The debate was fueled by last-minute questions about Mr. Memon’s supposed cooperation with investigators, by concerns about the treatment of Muslim defendants in India’s courts and by the uncontested fact that the actual masterminds of the bombings remain at large. 
 
 This week, as Mr. Memon’s execution began to appear more likely, Muslim leaders and some legal experts argued with increasing vehemence that India’s death penalty was applied more aggressively against Muslims and other minority groups. 
 
 “Yes, Yakub was involved, but he did not deserve capital punishment,” Asaduddin Owaisi, a Muslim member of India’s Parliament, told reporters here on Wednesday. He cited cases of non-Muslim defendants convicted of heinous crimes who have avoided execution. The debate even embroiled Salman Khan, one of India’s biggest movie stars, who on Sunday posted a series of messages on Twitter that seemed to imply that Mr. Memon was being hanged for the crimes of his older brother, Ibrahim (Tiger) Memon, who prosecutors say is one of the masterminds still at large. “Brother is being hanged for Tiger,” Mr. Khan wrote, only to retract his posts a short while later after facing heavy criticism, including from his father.
– The accountant who served as the "middleman" in the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed more than 250 people and injured more than 700 was hanged this morning—his 53rd birthday—at a prison in India, the New York Times reports. Yakub Memon, who raised funds for the attack, made travel arrangements, and obtained weapons and vehicles for car bombs, was the only defendant in the plot to be executed—a rare outcome in India, where only four people (including Memon) have been executed since 2000, the Times notes. Of the 100 people who've been convicted in connection with the crime, 10 others received death sentences that were commuted to life in prison, the AP reports. The main suspects, mobsters Dawood Ibrahim and Memon's brother Ibrahim, are still on the run. But there are many who don't think Memon should have gotten the death penalty. Social activists and even government officials protested the sentence, with some claiming that Muslims and other minority groups receive worse treatment in the penal system than the Hindu population. His lawyers also said that Memon surrendered of his own free will in Nepal, while a retired intelligence official wrote in a 2007 column that was just published last week that "there is a strong case for having second thoughts about the suitability of the death penalty" based on Memon's willingness to cooperate. But the judge who sentenced Memon tells the Times of India that even if he did surrender, that doesn't qualify "as an act of repentance or remorse."