By Chris Bartholomew
A woman, a call-girl, visiting the horror house D-5 forgot her cell-phone in a rickshaw. The rickshaw driver did not return the phone. It is now believed that the call girl never came out of the house, that she was murdered because she was blackmailing the duo. When she didn't turn up a missing person's complaint was filed with the police but the police could not find the killers. After some months, the cell-phone surfaced. The rickshaw driver who had found the phone kept it with him for a few months, but later sold it to another rickshaw driver, who activated it. That was how the cell-phone company was alerted: the girl's cell phone's IMEI number started to flash and this revealed the whereabouts of the rickshaw driver. He led the police to his room-mate, the rickshaw driver who had pocketed the phone, and this driver led the police to D-5. That was how the killer duo was arrested. Obviously the items found in the house, choppers, acid, rifles and perhaps remains of bodies, confirmed their guilt.
Many poor parents of missing children had told the police that their children went missing around the water tower near the house at D-5, but nothing was ever found if they even looked into their complaints.
Bags full of dismembered body parts found on Dec. 29, 2006 were pulled one by one from an open sewer behind a whitewashed two-story house belonging to Moninder Singh Pandher, a business executive. He and his servant, Surender Kohli, were arrested and charged with kidnapping, raping, and killing the victims, some reported to be as young as three.
They have both admitted to killing them for sex, and also to having sex with the victims after they were dead. The two little boys were kidnapped because they were very young and therefore mistaken for girls, but once they were inside the house they had to be killed. It is not known what was in the house, if the boys possibly saw something so that is why they had to be killed, or if it was because they could tell people that they were lured there.
Moninder Singh has confessed to the rapes, saying that he raped the kids because he had a 'high sex drive' and was 'depressed.' He alleges that Surender carried out the murders. Surender on his part has already admitted that he raped and killed several children, though the exact number is not known. It is estimated that over the last several years these two raped and killed almost 40 children.
Surender's reason for doing what he did was to cure his 'impotency.' He had been told by a tantrik, a witch doctor, that having sex with children would cure him.
An overwhelming stench led to the discovery of carefully chopped-up body parts in a drain next to Pandher's home.
Kohli, when confronted with photographs of some of the victims, confessed to having killed 10 women and five children. Kohli said that he and Pandher had lured some of the victims into the house with toffees and chocolates. Other victims were young women who were offered jobs at the house.
According to Kohli's confession, the two men sexually abused their victims, then strangled them and chopped up their bodies, concealing the remains in the drains. An autopsy report said the bodies were sliced with “butcher-like” precision.
Surender Kohli is a cannibal who ate not just the organs of the bodies he cut up but also flesh from the bones. Koli said his first victim was a four-year-old girl. He admitted to trying to eat the child's liver, but said he vomited immediately.
The body parts included 12 skulls belonging to children and five belonging to adults. Thirteen of the dead were quickly identified.
Asked what he had done with the missing torsos of the victims, Koli disclosed that he ate some of the organs and cut up others and flushed them down the toilet. The dismembered parts were disposed of separately.
The accused are continuously changing their statements. Pandher has categorically denied knowing anything about the murders. As for Surender, he keeps changing his confession, but the CBI believes that he could have killed far more children, and not just in Nithari, than he has admitted to.
Evidence has now been unearthed that actually dozens of children have been murdered by the serial killer duo.
It is now known that bloodstains, choppers and rifles were found in the house. But the shocking news is that the police dug up the remains of the children without forensic experts being present. There are fears that valuable evidence has been destroyed.
An attack on the pair occurred as a group of lawyers and scores of onlookers gathered outside the court in suburban Ghaziabad where Pandher and Kohli were produced for an extension of their time in police custody.
Pandher was beaten unconscious by the angry mob outside a court in India after being remanded in custody over the gruesome slayings. Pandher was knocked out and his co-suspect, domestic help Surender Kohli, was also roughed up as they were led from the court near the Indian capital.
The lawyers involved in the attack were believed to have been at the court on matters unrelated to the case which has shocked India.
Hundreds of angry Nithari residents have been protesting in the street where the bodies were found. They stormed past the officers guarding the house and broke into the premises, pelting neighboring houses with stones.
Public feelings have been running high ever since police began discovering human remains from drains around the “House of Horrors” in the wealthy New Delhi suburb of Noida where the two men lived. Local people complained that police long ignored complaints of children missing in the district.
One woman described to police officers the yellow suit her daughter Rupa was wearing when she went out to work early on Oct. 5, 2006. The clothes were found in the sewer, in a bag alongside body parts.
An impoverished migrant worker went to the police in October to report that her 20-year-old daughter was missing and officers laughed and said, “Why do you people have so many children if you can't look after them?”
At least 30 other sets of parents had reported children missing from the same slum area in Noida, an affluent suburb of New Delhi, over recent months. Some say they were dismissed as “drunken troublemakers.” Others say officers refused even to register their complaints.
Residents said as many as 38 children have been reported missing over the last two years from the slum, Nithari, but that the police recorded only 19, some say only 6 to 8, cases. Many parents were told their children must have run away.
After their complaints, six policemen in Noida were dismissed, three suspended for neglect of duty, and the investigation was transferred to the federal CBI.
Editor's note: this article was written in 2008, while both men were in custody and before any trial, and it reports the confessions as the investigation then presented them. Those confessions did not survive the courts. Surender Koli was tried repeatedly from 2009 and sentenced to death in several cases, but in October 2023 the Allahabad High Court acquitted him in twelve of the thirteen cases against him, holding his confession inadmissible; he remains convicted in the case of Rimpa Haldar, commuted to life in 2015. Moninder Singh Pandher was acquitted in the same 2023 judgment and has been released. The court was severely critical of the investigation, including the failure the article itself notes, that the remains were dug up without forensic experts present. The figure of forty is an estimate from the weeks after the discovery and was never established anywhere. What is not in dispute is the part of this article about the parents: their children went missing, the police did not record the complaints, and officers were dismissed and suspended over it.