MUMBAI: India executed convicted bomb plotter Yakub Memon on Thursday for conspiring in the country’s deadliest attack, a series of blasts that killed hundreds in Mumbai more than two decades ago.

Memon was hanged in Nagpur jail in the western state of Maharashtra on his 53rd birthday after India’s president and Supreme Court rejected 11th-hour appeals for clemency.

“It is complete. Yakub Memon was hanged today at 7am,” Nagpur police sub-inspector R.V. Halami said.

Memon, a former accountant, was convicted of plotting a series of coordinated bomb attacks that rocked India’s financial capital in March 1993, killing 257 people and injuring around 700 more.

The Bombay Stock Exchange, the offices of Air India and a luxury hotel were among about a dozen targets of the blasts. They were believed to have been staged by Mumbai’s underworld in retaliation for anti-Muslim violence that had killed more than 1,000 people a few months earlier.

Security was tight near the targets and at sensitive areas across Mumbai on Thursday, with heavily armed police outside Memon’s former home and at a cemetery where the body was taken for burial late in the afternoon.

Published in Dawn, July 31st, 2015

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