Nithari killings: SC rejects 14 appeals of CBI challenging acquittal of Koli and Pandher

The apex court rejected the submissions of the CBI that the Allahabad HC had erred in its verdict acquitting Koli.

New Delhi: In a major blow to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed as many as 14 appeals filed by the central agency against the order of the Allahabad High Court acquitting the accused Surendra Koli in the brutal 2006 Nithari serial killings cases in Noida in Uttar Pradesh.

"There is no perversity in the findings of the Allahabad High Court order acquitting Koli," a bench of Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justices Satish Chandra Sharma and K Vinod Chandran said.

The court found serious lacunae in the probe agency's investigation, as far as Section 27 of the Evidence Act was concerned. It said the recovery of skulls and other belongings of the victims from an open drain was not made by the CBI, following the statement of Koli before the police. 

It rejected the submissions of the CBI that the Allahabad HC had erred in its verdict acquitting Koli.

The bench also said only those recoveries, which are made from a place accessible to the accused only, can be admitted as evidence in a case primarily hinging on circumstantial evidence.

The CBI had last year moved the apex court by filing 14 appeals and challenged the Allahabad High Court's order of acquitting Koli. 

Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic help Koli were accused of rape and murder of people, mostly children from their neighbourhood in Nithari in Uttar Pradesh.

The court had earlier decided to hear separately the respective appeals filed by the CBI and the Uttar Pradesh government challenging the Allahabad High Court's verdict.

In July 2017, the special CBI court judge Pawan Kumar Tiwari, in his verdict, held Pandher and Koli guilty for killing of a 20- year-old woman, Pinki Sarkar, and sentenced them to death for their brutal and diabolical crime.

The Allahabad High Court had later, in January, 2015 commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment on account of an inordinate delay in deciding on Koli's mercy petition. The HC judgement was pronounced by a two-judge bench of then High Court Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud (since retired CJI) and Justice P K S Baghel (since retired) on a petition filed by the Peoples' Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR).

The HC had in October last year acquitted Pandher and Koli in some of the cases concerning the Nithari killings and overturned the death penalty imposed on them by the trial court. The HC had acquitted Koli in 12 cases and Pandher in 2 cases, where they were earlier held guilty for murder and awarded the death penalty by the trial court.

The HC had also censured the investigating agencies for a very casual probe in the case.

On July 8, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the CBI, had told the apex court that Koli was a serial killer who used to lure young girls and kill them. 

"The killings were gruesome," he said and told the bench that there were accusations of cannibalism and the trial court had awarded death penalty to Koli, but the same had been reversed by the Allahabad High Court last year.

The cases came to light in December 2006, in the small village in Nithari - a distance of 20 odd kilometers from the national capital -- when several skeletons were discovered in a drain near a house at the village in Noida.