India's top court upheld the death penalty on Thursday for a mastermind of the country's deadliest series of attacks and ruled a Bollywood star who bought weapons from the bombers must return to jail. 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 Supreme Court for his role in the 1993 blasts which killed 257 people in Mumbai.
The judges also handed down a five-year term for the actor Sanjay Dutt for possessing illegal weapons bought from gangsters accused of orchestrating the bombings. Dutt has already served 18 months but is currently out on bail. Announcing the sentences, Supreme Court judge P. Sathashivam said the Memon brothers and another suspect, Dawood Ibrahim, "were archers and the 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.
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