CBI has filed a new petition in the Supreme Court against the High Court’s decision to acquit Surendra Koli in the sensational Nithari case of 2006. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear this. The bench of Justices BR Gavai and KV Vishwanathan has added this petition with the petitions pending in the Supreme Court against the High Court order of October 16, 2024.
On July 19, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear separate petitions filed by the CBI and the UP government against the High Court’s decision. A notice was also issued to Surendra Koli on these petitions and his reply was sought. In May, the court had agreed to hear a petition by the father of a victim challenging the High Court’s decision to acquit Koli in a case.
In this case, Moninder Singh Pandher was acquitted by the Sessions Court, while Surendra Koli was given death sentence on September 28, 2010. The High Court had acquitted Pandher and Koli in the case in which both were awarded death sentence. Overturning the death sentence awarded to Koli in 12 cases and Pandher in 2 cases, the court had said that the prosecution had failed to prove guilt.
A total of 19 cases were registered against Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic help Surendra Koli in the year 2007. The CBI had filed closure reports in three cases due to lack of evidence, but of the remaining 16 cases, Koli was acquitted in the first three and his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in one. On December 29, 2006, skeletons of 8 children were found in a drain in Nithari, Noida.
At that time, Surendra Koli was accused that he used to bring girls to the mansion. Used to rape them. Then after killing he would throw out the pieces of the dead body. This matter came to light after dozens of girls from Nithari village went missing. It so happened that on May 7, 2006, a girl named Payal had gone missing. She had come to Pandher’s house by rickshaw. He stopped the rickshaw puller outside the mansion and asked him to come back and pay the money.
When she did not return after a long time, the rickshaw puller knocked at the gate of the house to take money. On this Surendra Koli told him that Payal had left a long time ago. The rickshaw puller became suspicious after hearing Surendra’s words. He said that he was in front of the house, Payal did not come out. Then he conveyed this to Payal’s family. After this, Payal’s father Nandlal filed a case that his daughter has gone missing from the house.
In this way the matter reached the police for the first time. Earlier, more than a dozen boys/girls had gone missing from Nithari. In such a situation, the police started investigating this case with full enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the police got information that Payal had a mobile phone. Which was being switched off after the incident. When the police got the call details of that number, numbers were found from Mumbai to many places. Then those numbers were examined.
Important clues were found in this. Based on that, when the police raided the house, the dark truth of Nithari’s ‘male vampire’ came out in front of everyone. When the police strictly interrogated Surendra and Moninder, they confessed to killing Payal after raping her and throwing her body in the drain next to the house. Meanwhile, on the trail of both, in December 2006, Noida Police had recovered a large number of human skeletons from the drain.