PUNE: Minutes before his execution in Pune's Yerwada prison on Wednesday, Pakistani gunman Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab appeared to be nervous but was quiet and offered prayers, a jail official said. "From his body language, we could make out that he was very nervous. However, he remained quiet before he was taken out from his cell for the hanging," the official said. Kasab had also offered prayers and asked if his family was informed in advance about the hanging to which jail authorities replied in the affirmative, the official said. Nearly four years after the Mumbai terror attack, Kasab, the sole surviving Pakistani gunman, was hanged this morning at Yerwada central prison here in a secret operation.

Kasab had been made to sign his death warrant before being moved to the Pune jail on November 19.

According to official sources, a senior jail official read out the death warrant to Kasab at his cell and also informed him that his clemency petition had been rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee.

After reading out his death warrant, Kasab, who was part of the 10-member Lashkar group that carried out the dastardly attack on November 26, 2008, was asked to sign it which he did, the sources said.

Later, he was taken by the Yerwada Jail police and the local police was kept out of the loop to maintain secrecy of the operation.

Barring a couple of officers, the 200-strong contingent of ITBP, which has been guarding him since March 2009, had been kept out of loop about his transfer to the Pune jail.

The sources said the ITBP jawans continued to guard the empty high-security cell, which had been housing 25-year-old Kasab. Ten terrorists belonging to Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) had come to Mumbai and carried out the dastardly strikes in which 166 people were killed. Nine of them were killed during the 60-hour siege which began on the night of November 26, 2008. Kasab was, however,caught alive.