Ajmal Kasab — youngest to be hanged after 17 years

Chaitraly Deshmukh and Prasannakumar Keskar
Among the 56 convicts hanged at Yerwada jail since Independence, Ajmal Amir Kasab is the youngest.Kasab’s hanging on Wednesday comes after the gap of 17 years.
The last convict to be hanged at the Yerwada jail was Alibaug-based Sudhakar Joshi, who was hanged on August 26, 1995.

According to the prison department records, Joshi had been convicted in a robbery and triple murder case in Mumbai.
In 1988, he robbed his employer, who was a businessman,  and murdered him and his two children.He had confessed to the crime and the sessions court sentenced him to death. The Bombay high court and the Supreme Court upheld the verdict.

The jail has seen the hanging of those convicted in some sensational cases.The four convicts in the Joshi Abhyankar families murder case of 1976 that had rocked Pune were hanged at Yerwada jail in 1983. The accused committed ten murders between January 1976 and March 1977.In October 1992, the assassins of General Arun Kumar Vaidya, Harjinder Singh “Jinda” and Sukhvinder Singh Sukha were hanged at the same jail. Just before they were hanged, there was an attempt to free them from the jail by smuggling a gun inside.The jail has a total of 29 prisoners condemned to death, awaiting their execution.
Among them are 10 convicts of 1993 Mumbai serial blasts.