Mukesh Singh, one of the four death-row convicts in the 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder case, on Friday filed a plea in the Supreme Court seeking the restoration of all his legal remedies, PTI reported. Singh alleged that a “criminal conspiracy” and “fraud” was hatched by the Centre, Delhi government and advocate Vrinda Grover, who is the amicus curiae in the case.

This came a day after a court in Delhi ruled that Singh along with the three other convicts – Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma and Pawan Gupta – have exhausted all their legal options. They are now scheduled to be hanged at Tihar Jail in Delhi on March 20 at 5.30 am.

The plea was filed through advocate ML Sharma and claimed that the respondents “knowingly and deliberately” plotted a conspiracy against Singh for vested and political interests. “They compelled him to sign various papers under threat of sessions court order [which was never issued by the sessions court] stating that court has directed her [Grover] to secure various signed documents from him to file various petitions, including curative petition, on his behalf in the high court and the Supreme Court in his death sentence case,” the plea added.

“Being pressurised/feared due to so-called session court order, the petitioner signed various sets of vakalatnama for her and signed other papers for her,” the plea said. “Recently the petitioner came to know that there was no such session court order.”

The petition further claimed that the limitation period to file a curative petition was three years from the date of dismissal of the review plea. He asked the court to “restore” the rights available to him and allow him to file curative and mercy petitions till July 2021.

The four men, along with two others, raped and brutally assaulted a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving bus in Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012. The woman succumbed to her injuries two weeks later at a hospital in Singapore. The gangrape triggered huge protests in the Capital and across the country. One convict died in prison, while a minor convict was sent to a detention home for juveniles and was released in December 2015.