Our wait for justice was painful and agonising but we finally got it, Asha Devi, the mother of Nirbhaya said minutes after four of her daughter’s rapists and killers were hanged at Delhi’s Tihar Jail this morning.

“We will continue our fight for justice for India’s daughters. Our wait for justice was painful and agonising. We finally got justice. I hugged my daughter’s photo,” Asha Devi said. “The beasts have been hanged,” she told reporters.

Akshay Thakur, 31, Pawan Gupta, 25, Vinay Sharma, 26, and Mukesh Singh, 32, were hanged at Tihar Jail, where they had spent the last few hours in isolation. The four convicts were hanged to death seven years after they raped the medical student in a moving bus. The brutal incident finally led to her death.

“I want to thank everyone, judiciary, government for this. The courts proactively dismissed all petitions. The country was ashamed in 2012,” Asha Devi said.

As the Patiala House Court and the Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the pleas of all four convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case, wife of Akshay Singh, one of the four death-row convicts, fainted outside the Patiala House Court, saying that she and her minor son be hanged too.

“I want justice too. Kill me too. I don’t want to live. My husband is innocent. Why is the society after us?,” she cried outside the court premises. “We were living with the hope that we will get the justice, but we are being killed every day for the past seven years,” she said.

The four men refused to eat and were up all night, said officials. The entire jail was on lockdown through the night, and officials said, no other prisoner in Asia’s largest jail could sleep a wink.

The convicts were taken out of their cells at 3:30 am.