A British officer shot the last Mughal emperor's sons in 1857, and in 2025 India's Supreme Court threw out his great-grandson's widow's claim to the Red Fort

Bahadur Shah Zafar was the last Mughal emperor. When British forces retook Delhi in September 1857, William Hodson found him at Humayun's Tomb on 20 September and brought him in under orders to deliver him unharmed. The next day Hodson went back for three princes, Mirza Mughal, Mirza Khizr Sultan and Abu Bakr. They surrendered. When a crowd gathered, Hodson shot them; accounts differ on whether he used a carbine for all three or a pistol for the last. The British exiled the emperor to Rangoon, where he died under house arrest on 7 November 1862. He was buried quietly; a body identified as his was found in the early 1990s, and a shrine stands there. The Red Fort passed to the British and then to the Indian state. Sultana Begum of Howrah married Mirza Bedar Bakht, a great-grandson of the emperor, on 15 August 1965. She has worked as a bookbinder and made lacquer bangles. She petitioned the Delhi High Court for the fort as his heir, with compensation from 1857. A single judge dismissed the petition in 2021 for delay, and a division bench affirmed in December 2024. On 5 May 2025 Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna's bench dismissed her appeal as "wholly misconceived" and asked why she had not claimed Fatehpur Sikri as well.