[JURIST] Former India Supreme Court [official website] judge Markandey Katju on Sunday said [personal blog] that “there has been a gross travesty of justice in the case of Yakub Memon.” Katju said that after thoroughly studying the judgment of the court, he believes that Memon was convicted on weak evidence for his involvement in the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings [IBN backgrounder] that killed 257 people. The conviction relied on a retracted confession of a co-accused man and police’s claims of recoveries they made. Katju wrote, “As regards the first, everyone knows how ‘confessions’ are obtained by the police in our country–by torture… As regards ‘recoveries’, anyone having even the slighted knowledge of the working of the police knows that such alleged recoveries are often planted.” Memon is scheduled to be hanged at the end of the month after the Supreme Court rejected his curative petition last week.

Yakub Memon has been in prison since 1994, when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) [official website] purportedly arrested him in Kathmandu. Sources in the Mumbai Police department said he had returned voluntarily. In July 2007 an Indian court sentenced [JURIST report] Memon to death for orchestrating the attacks that spread havoc throughout the city and included a horrific attack on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Memon is the brother of the attack mastermind “Tiger” Memon who currently remains at large. In March 2013 the Indian Supreme Court upheld [JURIST report] Memon’s death sentence. The court, in upholding the sentence, found that his actions were “carried out with utter disregard to human life and dignity” which justifies the rare imposition of the death penalty.