India hangs child murderer

A man convicted of raping and murdering a teenage girl was hanged at dawn, in India’s first execution in nine years, as dozens of anti-death penalty protesters held a vigil outside the prison.

Dhananjaya Chatterjee, 39, was executed by an 84-year-old hangman yesterday in the courtyard of Alipora Correctional Home, Calcutta, where he has spent the last 13 years in solitary confinement.

About 70 protesters had gathered at 2am local time, lit candles and held anti-death penalty banners. At 4.30am, the time of the execution, they were silent for a moment, then left.

Chatterjee was convicted of raping and suffocating Hetal Parekh, 14, who lived in a Calcutta apartment building where he worked as a security guard. He was arrested in 1990 and transferred to the solitary confinement of Death Row cell after his conviction in 1991.

Chatterjee and his family had maintained his innocence, and lawyers filed appeals twice to the Supreme Court and sought clemency from two Indian presidents.

President APJ Abdul Kalam turned down the final clemency plea last week and the Supreme Court rejected another appeal on Thursday.

Nata Mullick, 84, performed the hanging. He had also carried out the last hanging in West Bengal state in 1991, when two men were executed for killing four members of a family.

India’s last execution was in 1995, when an auto-rickshaw driver convicted in the serial murders of prostitutes was hanged in southern Tamil Nadu state.

India’s Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that the death penalty should be imposed only in “the rarest of rare cases”.

Although several convicts have been sentenced to death in the past decade, none has been executed, because of appeals pending before higher courts or because they have won clemency.

Trials and appeals often take decades in India’s slow-moving judicial system.