The order of the special MCOCA court sentencing five bomb planters to death and seven other accused to imprisonment till death is appropriate considering that 189 persons lost their lives and 829 were injured on July 11, 2006 when seven RDX bombs ripped through first class compartments of local trains in Mumbai. It's not over yet and the journey to the gallows is going to be a long legal battle. Nine years ago the key operatives in this grand plan to kill and maim, may have felt like heroes. On the Wednesday, they were paid in the same coin. To quote the title for a popular Jeffery Archer novel, 'Not a penny more, not a penny less'. The train blasts was one of the four major terrorist attacks on the nation. The 1993 blasts marked the beginning of large scale attacks. This was followed by the train blasts in 2006 and the infamous 10-man raid on Mumbai in 2008. Kasab was the lone terrorist to hang for it while Yakub Memon paid the price for the 1993 blasts. Afzal Guru was hanged for his role in the attack on Parliament in 2001 and till Wednesday the train blasts seemed like an unfinished chapter. It is now complete. Although the death sentence has finality written all over it and makes one cringe at the thought of a person being killed by the State, terrorism is a crime that falls in the rarest of rare categories.
