The killings of four men accused of gang-raping and murdering a young woman last week in Hyderabad have been largely greeted with joy in India, reports BBC.

Just hours after the shootings, about 2,000 people gathered at the site to celebrate the police action.

They chanted “police zindabad” (“hail the police”), distributed sweets and showered flowers on the spot where the 27-year-old vet’s charred body was found last week and where the shooting took place on Friday morning.

In her neighbourhood too, a large number of people gathered, setting off celebratory firecrackers and distributing sweets.

The celebrations and support for the police are continuing online too.

On Twitter, there are more than 300,000 tweets with various hashtags about the shooting and the crime, with most of the voices supportive of the police action.

And there is a reason for that: the meandering pace of the Indian judicial system means it often takes years, even decades, to deliver justice.

There are tens of millions of pending cases in courts, including nearly 150,000 cases of rape, and this has eroded the public faith in the criminal justice system.

The biggest example of this in recent years is the December 2012 torture, gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in Delhi.

Some wondered whether the police had arrested the right men and whether they had not just picked up some poor truckers to pacify public anger.

One man on local TV said he found it unbelievable that all four men had had to be shot dead because they were trying to snatch the weapons of the police. “All four?” he kept asking.