The Supreme Court has stayed till 31st of this month the execution of death penalty of two of the four convicts in the December 16 Delhi gangrape and murder case. The apex court stayed execution of Mukesh and Pawan two days after the Delhi High Court upheld their death penalty awarded by the trial court.

A bench comprising justices Ranjana Prakash Desai and Shiva Kirti Singh issued the order after an urgent hearing on a holiday by their lawyer.

Besides Mukesh and Pawan , the High Court had also upheld the conviction and death penalty of Akshay Thakur and Vinay Sharma.

While dismissing their appeals, the High Court had termed the offence as extremely fiendish and unparallelled in the history of criminal jurisprudence and said the exemplary punishment” is the need of the hour.

It also said if this case is not the rarest of rare cases” then there is likely to be none.

The 23-year-old paramedic, on the fateful night of December 16, 2012, was brutally assaulted and gangraped by six persons in a moving bus in South Delhi and thrown out of the vehicle with her male friend. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29.

Prime accused in the case Ram Singh was found dead in Tihar Jail in March last year. The sixth accused, the juvenile was convicted in August and sentenced to a maximum of three years in a reformation home by the Juvenile Justice Board.