Nithari shocker

More than a decade and a half after the Nithari serial killings shocked and outraged the nation, the Allahabad High Court has acquitted convicts Surendra Koli and Moninder Singh Pandher due to ‘lack of evidence’. Businessman Pandher and his domestic help Koli had been sentenced to death — the former in two cases that were being heard by the high court and the latter in 12 — after being found guilty of rape and murder. They were arrested in December 2006 after the police recovered skeletal remains from a drain behind Pandher’s house in Noida; the remains were mostly of children who had gone missing from the neighbourhood.

The HC has observed that the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. The verdict has raised serious doubts about the probe conducted by the CBI. On the basis of the telltale evidence and Koli’s confession, a special CBI court in Ghaziabad had held him guilty of murder, rape, abduction and destruction of proof of the crimes, while Pandher had been found involved in immoral trafficking as well. Nevertheless, the premier investigating agency somehow failed to build an airtight case against the duo.

The families of the victims have every reason to feel betrayed by the justice delivery system. The entire case was marked by callousness from the outset. Appallingly, then UP CM Mulayam Singh Yadav’s brother and state cabinet minister Shivpal Yadav had called the gruesome murders chhoti-moti ghatna (a minor incident). Complaints about several children going missing were not taken seriously by the police, while the alleged complicity between Pandher and some cops was never thoroughly probed. The acquittal points fingers at the investigators as it is a stark reminder of how the horrifying truth becomes a casualty of a shoddy probe.

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