A death warrant has been issued for the four men convicted of the 2012 gang-rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi

A death warrant has been issued for the four men convicted of the 2012 gang-rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, which galvanised protests across India and brought global attention to the country’s sexual violence epidemic.

A court in the Indian capital scheduled the hangings for 22 January, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

The warrant had been anticipated since India’s supreme court rejected one of the men’s final review pleas last month. The Indian president can still grant mercy, but this is not expected.

The victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student referred to by Indian media as Nirbhaya, the Hindi word for fearless – because Indian law prohibits rape victims from being identified – was heading home from a cinema with a male friend in December 2012 when six men lured them on to a bus. With no one else in sight, they beat the man with a metal bar, raped the woman and used the bar to inflict massive internal injuries.

The pair were dumped naked on the roadside, and the woman died two weeks later.

The assailants were tried relatively quickly in a country where sexual assault cases often languish for years. Four defendants were sentenced to death in 2013. Another hanged himself in prison before his trial began, though his family have insisted he was killed. The sixth assailant was a minor at the time of the attack and sentenced to three years in a reform institution.