Raisina Road car bomb in Delhi and the Bhullar case

Who: Maninder Singh Bitta, a Youth Congress leader and critic of the Khalistan movement, who was the target; the nine people killed; and Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, whom the authorities named as one of those responsible and described as an affiliate of the Khalistan Liberation Force.

What: On 11 September 1993, at midday, a remote-controlled car bomb exploded outside the Indian Youth Congress offices on Raisina Road in New Delhi. Bitta, who had just left his office by car, survived with shrapnel wounds to the chest. Nine people died, two of them his bodyguards, and between 31 and 36 were wounded; accounts differ on the injured.

Bhullar left India for Germany in December 1994 and asked for asylum. Germany refused and sent him back in 1995, on the condition, as the accounts put it, that he would get a fair trial and not be hanged. He was arrested on his return and prosecuted under TADA. On 25 August 2001 the trial court sentenced him to death. In 2002 the Supreme Court upheld the sentence by 2 to 1: the presiding judge dissented and would have acquitted him. His review petition was dismissed on 17 December 2002 and his curative petition on 12 March 2003. The President rejected his mercy petition in May 2011. On 12 April 2013 the Supreme Court refused to commute the sentence, holding that delay in deciding a mercy petition could not be examined where the crime had killed many innocent people.

That view was reversed. On 21 January 2014 the Court held that unexplained delay is a ground for commuting a death sentence to life. On 31 March 2014 a four-judge bench led by Chief Justice P. Sathasivam commuted Bhullar's sentence, citing the unexplained delay of eight years in deciding his mercy petition and his mental illness; a report of the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences found that he had schizophrenia. The Punjab Assembly also passed a resolution saying that hanging him would be a miscarriage of justice.

Where: Raisina Road, New Delhi. Bhullar's appeals ended in the Supreme Court in New Delhi.

Why it mattered: The bombing is the origin of one of the best known death penalty cases tied to the Sikh struggle, argued for two decades over a TADA trial, a split Supreme Court verdict, and the condition on which Germany returned him. The 2014 commutation turned on unexplained delay in deciding a mercy petition and on the prisoner's mental illness.