On Wednesday, India’s top court upheld the judgment of the Mumbai High Court that Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving gunman in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, should hang to death. The Supreme Court charged Kasab with waging war against the nation — a crime that carries the death penalty in India — and said it had no option but to uphold the earlier judgment. Kasab was among ten men who carried out attacks on key Mumbai landmarks including two hotels, a railway station and a Jewish center, killing 166 people on November 26, 2008. The court turned down Kasab’s main defense that he was not given a fair trial. “Not providing counsel to Kasab by the government at pre-trial stage,” the judgment read, “does not vitiate his trial in the case.”
Kasab’s conviction was based on the now-infamous video footage of him striding along the Chhatrapati Terminus in Mumbai, an AK-47 in his hand and a backpack slung casually on one shoulder. In February 2009, over a year after the carnage, Indian investigators filed an 11,000-page charge sheet against him for murder, conspiracy and waging war against the nation. The first death sentence against Kasab was pronounced in May 2010, 18 months after his capture, by a lower trial court in Mumbai, and upheld by the Mumbai High Court in October last year