Who is Advocate AP Singh and why is #NirbhayaBetrayed trending on social media?

The Nirbhaya case is finally over, with four out of the six convicts accused or gang-rape and murder of a physiotherapy student in 2012 getting hanged to death on Friday morning. However, in the midst of the celebrations and distribution of sweets, one of the trends doing the rounds was #NirbhayaBetrayed.

The reason for this was AP Singh, a Supreme Court advocate, who had the unenvious job of defending the five accused (Originally there were five, but one committed suicide in jail. The sixth accused – a minor – was sent to a remand home for rehabilitation).

According to a report in News 18, Singh, who has a doctorate in criminology, has ‘used every loophole in the system to delay the death sentence of the accused.’ He had even approached the National Human Rights Commission and the International Court of Justice on grounds that the death penalty is not an acceptable form of punishment.

But Singh is not new to controversy. He had publicly shamed the gang-rape and murder victim, claiming that if his daughter ‘moved around with her boyfriend at night’ and had ‘premarital sex’, then he would have doused her in petrol and burnt her alive.

Before the four accused were hanged, in a last minute desperate move, Singh even said, “Send them to Indo-Pak border, send them to Doklam, but don’t hang them. They are ready to serve the country. I can file an affidavit in this regard.”

Following the hanging Twitter launched an attack on Singh