The lone surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks that left 166 dead has filed a case at the Indian Supreme Court asking for his death sentence to be overturned, a court source told AFP Friday.
The source said Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab had sent an appeal against his conviction and sentence via jail authorities in Mumbai, where he has been held since the attacks, which has been lodged with the court’s secretary general.
“He filed the appeal through the Arthur Road jail authorities,” the source said, asking not to be named.
Pakistani national Kasab, one of 10 Islamist gunmen who laid siege to Mumbai for nearly three days, was convicted by a trial court in the Indian commercial and entertainment capital in May 2010.
The first appeal by the 23-year-old school drop-out from a poor farming area in Pakistan’s Punjab state failed in February, when the state high court confirmed his death sentence.
Lawyer Ujjwal Nikam, who prosecuted the case in Mumbai, confirmed to AFP that “he (Kasab) has made the appeal proposal to the Supreme Court” without giving further details.
No one was immediately available for comment at the high security Arthur Road jail in south Mumbai, where Kasab is being held in solitary confinement. One of Kasab’s legal team for his appeal to the Bombay High Court in February, Farhana Shah, said that it was likely that her former client would be appointed a lawyer from the legal aid bench in New Delhi.
India has the death sentence, which is carried out by hanging, for the “rarest of the rare” criminal offences.
Kasab was found guilty of a string of crimes including waging war against India, murder, attempted murder and terrorist acts after a trial at a maximum security prison court in Mumbai.
If the Supreme Court upholds the verdict and sentence, Kasab can appeal for clemency to India’s president Pratibha Patil as a last resort.
Executions are rare in India. Instead, hundreds of convicts sit on death row awaiting a final decision on their pleas for clemency.
Afzal Guru, who was convicted of conspiring with the gunmen who attacked India’s parliament in 2001, killing 10 people, has been on death row for nearly a decade. His appeal against his death sentence was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2006. The last execution in India was in 2004 when a 41-year-old former security guard was hanged for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl.
In May this year, however, Patil unexpectedly rejected a mercy petition from a murderer in the north-eastern state of Assam, leaving the state scrabbling to find a hangman.
Many of the small number of known hangmen nationwide have either died or retired in recent years.