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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is set to contest the Allahabad High Court’s decision to acquit Surendra Koli and his former employer Moninder Singh Pandher in the 2006 Nithari killings case. It is reported that the CBI has acquired all pertinent documents from the Ghaziabad court for this purpose.
Last year on October 17, the Allahabad High Court acquitted Koli and his former employer Pandher, stating that the prosecution had not succeeded in proving their guilt. This decision came nearly 17 years after the discovery of human skulls, skeletal remains, and fragments of clothing belonging to missing girls, found stuffed in gunny bags in a drain outside businessman Pandher’s residence in Nithari village near Delhi.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) assumed control of the investigation from the Uttar Pradesh Police in January 2007.
Sources indicate that after thoroughly reviewing the case documents and seeking legal opinions, the CBI has opted to contest two cases where Koli is implicated as the accused and Pandher as the co-accused, along with the ten cases where Koli stands as the sole accused. Procuring certified copies from the Ghaziabad Court has been an extensive undertaking. Given that the documents are in Hindi, an agency has been enlisted to translate them into English. The CBI intends to initiate the challenge against their acquittal in the Supreme Court in the forthcoming days, as stated by the source.
Koli, who resided and worked as domestic help at Pandher’s residence, was acquitted in 12 cases pertaining to the 2006 killings. Meanwhile, Pandher was acquitted in two cases filed against him.
Both Koli and Pandher had been sentenced to death in these cases involving charges of rape, murder, and destruction of evidence, among others, by a CBI court in Ghaziabad in 2009. Out of these cases, Koli was the sole accused in 10 instances, while in two others, he was accused alongside Pandher.
In a case where both Koli and Pandher had been sentenced to death, a bench comprising Justices Ashwani Kumar Mishra and Syed Aftab Husain Rizvi rebuked the investigators in 2023 while acquitting them. The bench stated, “Upon evaluation of the evidence… on the touchstone of fair trial guaranteed to an accused under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, we hold that prosecution has failed to prove the guilt of accused… beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The bench further stated that the investigation, in other aspects, is marred by serious flaws, with fundamental protocols for evidence collection being flagrantly disregarded. It seems evident to them that the investigation chose the convenient route of implicating a vulnerable household servant by vilifying him, without adequately exploring more substantial aspects, such as the potential involvement of organized activities like organ trafficking.
