The four convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case were hanged to death at 5:30 a.m. in Delhi's Tihar jail on Friday, bringing the curtains down on the drama surrounding the execution that saw the death warrants cancelled thrice on various grounds over the last two-and-a-half months. The hanging was carried out as per schedule at 5:30 a.m. after a three-judge Supreme Court bench rejected the final plea by the convicts' lawyer AP Singh to stay their execution in a late-night hearing.

The hangman, Pawan, who had reached the Tihar jail on Tuesday, three days before the hanging and conducted necessary dummy hangings, pulled the liver at the scheduled time. The victim's parents -- mother Asha Devi and father Badrinath Singh -- hailed the hanging saying that their daughter had finally got the justice, over seven years after she was brutalised in a moving bus in the national capital.