A Delhi state police van believed to be carrying the accused in a gang rape leaves the Saket district court in New Delhi, India. Picture: Saurabh Das/AP

New Delhi – He was convicted of ruthlessly torturing and raping a woman on a bus. Now he says he shouldn’t get the death penalty because pollution is already killing him.

Akshay Thakur is one of six men charged in the brutal assault of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi in 2012. She’s become known as “Nirbhaya,” or “fearless one.”

The victim was a paramedical college student trying to rise above her family’s poverty. Then she went out that fateful night in December to see the movie “Life of Pi” at a Delhi cineplex with a male friend. On their return home, the two hailed a minibus, where they encountered six men who were drunk and looking for sex, according to the charging documents. The duo tried, and failed, to fight off the group’s advances. Thakur and the other assailants took turns raping the victim for almost an hour as the bus carried on its route around the city. They then dumped her ravaged body on the street.

She died of her wounds two weeks later.

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