India sends Sanjay Dutt to jail in 1993 Mumbai blasts case

Supreme Court hands down 5-year term for possessing illegal weapons bought from gangsters.

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court of India on Thursday handed down a five-year term for the Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt for possessing illegal weapons bought from gangsters accused of orchestrating Mumbai bombings in 1993.

The series of bombings killed 257 people in the city.

The court also upheld the death penalty for the mastermind of the attack, the deadliest in the country's history.

Yakub Memon, brother of the alleged main plotter and fugitive Tiger Memon, was the only one of 11 convicts to see his death sentence upheld by the court for his role in the blasts which wounded more than 800 people.

Announcing the sentences, Supreme Court judge P. Sathashivam said the Memon brothers and another fugitive suspect who is said to be living in Pakistan "were archers and rest of the appellants were arrows in their hands".

"They were the architects of the blasts," Sathashivam, one of two judges presiding over the case, said.

The remaining convicts who had appealed against the death penalty saw their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.

Executions are only carried out for "the rarest of rare" cases in India but President Pranab Mukherjee has rejected a number of mercy pleas in the last few months, ending an unofficial eight-year moratorium.

Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri convicted of involvement in a deadly 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, was executed in New Delhi last month, triggering angry protests in the disputed region.

The lone surviving gunman from the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, was hanged last November, in the first execution in the country since 2004.