01The Imperial Institute, 1 July 1909
He was born in Amritsar to a well-off family loyal to the Raj, and went to London in 1906 to study engineering at University College. At India House he came into the circle of Savarkar. On the evening of 1 July 1909, at a gathering of the National Indian Association at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, he shot Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India. A Parsi doctor, Cawas Lalcaca, who stepped in, was also killed. Dhingra made no attempt to escape. His family publicly disowned him.
02Trial and Pentonville
He was tried at the Old Bailey on 23 July 1909. He refused to recognise the court’s right to try him and was sentenced to death. A written statement found on him, which the police had kept back, was published by the Daily News the day after he was hanged; in it he said that an attack on his country was an attack on his religion. He was hanged at Pentonville on 17 August 1909, aged twenty-five, and buried in the prison. His remains were brought back to India in 1976.
