Nithari accused Surinder Koli gets death penalty in sixth case

A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Ghaziabad on Friday awarded the death penalty to Surinder Koli in the sixth case related to the Nithari killings.

A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Ghaziabad on Friday awarded the death penalty to Surinder Koli in the sixth case related to the Nithari killings.

Surinder Koli(L), accused in the Nithari serial killings, was on Friday sentenced to death by a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court.(Hindustan Times/ File Photo)

The killings were discovered in 2006 when dismembered bodies of children and women were found dumped around the Sector 31 house of Koli’s employer, Moninder Singh Pandher, in Noida.

The sixth case relates to a 25-year-old domestic help from Nithari in Noida, who hailed from Nepal and had served as a domestic help at Pandher’s house before she disappeared on October 31, 2006. Koli has also been awarded the death penalty in five other cases decided earlier at Ghaziabad.

According to the charge-sheet filed by CBI, the women had stopped working at Pandher’s house in August 2006 as she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. A day before the woman disappeared, Koli had called her outside the house and asked her to rejoin work.

On October 31, 2006, she left her house at 7am and told her husband that after her work, she would go to Pandher’s house to meet Koli as he had offered her to resume work there. She never came back. Following a search, her husband and brother-in-law went to meet Koli, who told them that the woman did not come to their house.

After human skulls, bones, clothes and other remains were discovered from a closed gallery behind Pandher’s house at D5, sector 31 Noida, the woman’s husband identified her salwar. A skull superimposition test also identified the victim as the 25-year-old domestic help.

The hearing in this case started in 2013 and Koli was held guilty after the prosecution produced 50 witnesses. Koli was held guilty of abduction, rape, murder and destruction of evidence.

Koli and Pandher were arrested in December 2006.

In January 2015, the Allahabad high court commuted Koli’s sentence to life imprisonment in one case. He is lodged in Dasna jail in Ghaziabad since December 2006.