India carries out first execution in a decade

Apartment guard Dhananjoy Chatterjee, 42, was executed at 4:30 am (2300 GMT Friday), a jail official told reporters outside the prison.

He had been sentenced to death in 1991 for the rape and murder of a teenage schoolgirl the previous year.

Among hundreds of people who gathered outside the prison were human rights activists who held an all-night vigil to protest the execution. About 200 policemen watched over the crowd.

Some of the protesters carried banners which read "Stop capital punishment" and "Abolish the death penalty."

One of the protesters, Association for Protection of Democratic Rights representative Sujata Bakdra, said: "It is inhumane to hang anyone in a civilised society. The government has done an injustice to Dhananjoy by hanging him."

Human rights activists also held candlelight vigils in a number of other places, including the southern city of Bangalore, to mark their opposition to capital punishment.

India's Supreme Court rarely authorises executions and they are regularly delayed indefinitely or commuted by the president. But the government is guarded about disclosing its death penalty records.

The last known execution in India took place in the southern Indian city of Madras in 1995 when an autorickshaw driver was hanged for killing prostitutes, a lawyer in the Kolkata High Court told AFP.

Eighty-three-year-old hangman Nata Mallick, who was tasked with Chatterjee's execution, has said he hanged two convicted killers in 1991.

Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh, the bodyguards convicted of assassinating prime minister Indira Gandhi, were executed in January 1989.

Chatterjee was involved in lengthy legal appeals since his sentencing. His final appeal for a presidential pardon was dismissed by President Abdul Kalam last week.

His lawyers had argued his conviction for the 1990 rape and murder of 16-year-old schoolgirl Hetal Parekh was based on circumstantial evidence and that police never carried out crucial DNA testing of evidence.

They also said his 13 years on death row and the "inordinate delay" in his execution had been punishment enough and the death sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment.

The inspector general of West Bengal prison, Joydev Chakraborty, said Chatterjee had been restless the night before his execution but had been calm as he was led to the gallows, taking with him the Hindu holy scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.

West Bengal Law Minister Nisith Adhikari said Friday that Chatterjee spent the day before his hanging singing hymns, reading scriptures and worshipping a framed portrait of Kali, the goddess of power, inside his cell.

His body would undergo a post mortem and be cremated according to Hindu rights, he said. It had not been claimed by his family.

Chatterjee's brother Bikash told AFP from the family's home village of Chatna, some 240km west of Kolkata, that police had informed his relatives that the execution had taken place and they were in deep shock.

Police had been sent to guard the family during the execution after they had threatened to commit suicide if it went ahead.