Closure for Delhi gang-rape victim's family?

All four men convicted of raping and murdering a 23-year-old woman in Delhi were sentenced to death on Friday, nine months after a crime whose savagery triggered furious protests across India and rare national debate about violence against women.

"Everybody got the death penalty," defence lawyer A.P. Singh told reporters outside the Delhi courtroom, where dozens of police had formed a barricade to keep crowds back.

One of the four men sentenced to death by hanging, gym instructor Vinay Sharma, was dragged out of the court crying.

The victim, who was raped for an hour and tortured with an iron rod on a moving bus, became a symbol of the dangers women face in a country where a rape is reported on average every 21 minutes and acid attacks and cases of molestation are common.

"This has shocked the collective conscience of society," Judge Yogesh Khanna told the court, referring to the attack.

The sentencing capped a seven-month trial, often held behind closed doors, that was punctuated dramatically by a fifth defendant hanging himself in his jail cell. A sixth, who was under 18 at the time of the attack, was earlier sentenced to three years detention, the maximum allowed under juvenile law.

It was one of the biggest tests in years of India's paradoxical attitude towards the death penalty.

Prosecutors had called for the "harshest punishment" to be given to Sharma, bus cleaner Akshay Kumar Singh, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta, and unemployed Mukesh Singh for last December's  murder to signal that such attacks cannot be tolerated.

The four men were found guilty of luring the woman onto a bus, raping and torturing her with a metal bar and then throwing her naked and bleeding onto the road. She died two weeks later.

Violent protests exploded in several cities after the crime, a reaction commentators and sociologists said reflected a deep well of frustration that many urban Indians feel over what they see as weak governance and poor leadership on social issues.

The government, seen as out of touch with the aspirations of the burgeoning urban middle class, was caught off guard by the protests.

TV cameramen and press photographers take pictures as an Indian police van believed to be carrying the accused in a gang rape case, arrives at the Saket Court Complex in New Delhi on September 13, 2013. An Indian judge sentenced four men to death for the brutal gang rape and murder of an Indian student on a bus.   AFP

Indian students of Saint Joseph Degree college participate in an anti-rape protest in Hyderabad on September 13, 2013.   The judge hearing the case of four men convicted for a shocking gang rape on a bus in New Delhi in December 2012 sentenced them to death. (AFP)

Indian police personnel stand guard outside the Saket Court Complex in New Delhi on September 13, 2013.   The judge hearing the case of four men convicted for a shocking gang rape on a bus in New Delhi December 2012 sentenced them to death.  (AFP)

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.