3 officials to witness their 2nd hanging in career

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After Independence, perhaps there are only three officials in any state who are involved in two consecutive hangings in high profile cases in their careers except in Maharashtra.

Meeran Borwankar, the Maharashtra prison department chief, Yogesh Desai, the superintendent of Nagpur Central Jail, and Rajendra Dhamne, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) (Eastern region) are the three officers, who directly supervised hanging of 26/11 terror attack case convict Ajmal Kasab in 2012.

Borwankar is a 1981-batch IPS officer of Maharashtra cadre, who is of additional director general of police rank officer. She was posted as head of the prison department in June 2012.

Kasab was hanged on November 21, 2012, at the Yerwada Central Jail in Pune. Dhamne was then posted as DIG (Western region) based in Pune, while Desai was the jail superintendent there.

Desai took charge at Nagpur central jail about over a month back, while Dhamne was shifted there few days back.

Jail officials said that all the preparations for the hanging has been done. Trials of the hanging were conducted on a dummy as per the jail manual.

According to the manual, Memon will be woken up early in the morning around 3 am, allowed to take a bath and offered some light refreshment. He would be given religious books to read or recite prayers. A team of doctors will examine Memon before the hanging.

A judicial magistrate will read out the operative part of the trial court’s order to Memon. After getting signal from the magistrate, the hangman, in this case a jail staff, will pull the lever. The body should be kept hanging for half an hour, the manual says.

The doctor will then check the body and declare him dead, and an autopsy would be conducted in the jail itself. The jail superintendent will decide whether to bury the body in the jail premises or hand over to relatives. But the state government’s order in this regard will be final. Sources said that most probably the body will be buried in the jail itself.