In December 2006 two residents of Nithari, a village on the edge of Noida outside Delhi, told a former president of the local residents' welfare association that they knew where the missing children were: in the municipal water tank behind house D5 in Sector 31. Both had daughters who had disappeared, and both suspected Surender Koli, the domestic servant at D5. They had been ignored by the authorities for months. That morning the three searched and said they found a decomposed hand, and called the police. Parents of children missing over the previous two years came running with photographs. When the digging was done, the remains recovered from the drains and ground around the house were counted, after examination at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, as nineteen skulls, sixteen complete and three damaged. Most were children, the majority of them girls from the poor settlement beside the housing colony.
The house belonged to a businessman, Moninder Singh Pandher. The case had begun with a twenty-year-old woman, Deepika, known as Payal, for whose disappearance a report had been filed on October 7, 2006; her father said the police had registered it only because a court intervened. Her mobile phone was traced through its use with another SIM card to a rickshaw puller who said it had come from someone at the Pandher house. Pandher was taken into custody on December 26 and Koli on December 27. Koli, who also used the name Satish, confessed to killing Payal and dumping her body behind the house, and when police dug there they found the children instead. He was from the Almora district of Uttarakhand.
The families accused the Noida police of having done nothing for two years. Some officers had told them their children were adults who had run away after quarrels at home. Residents said the police were corrupt, and a mob fought them outside the house. Two policemen were suspended on December 31, and after a central inquiry committee found gross negligence in the handling of the missing-persons reports, the Uttar Pradesh government suspended two superintendents of police and dismissed six officers. Rumors of an organ trade drew raids on a neighboring doctor's properties, which found nothing. Koli's confession, taken under narco-analysis and in custody, spoke of rape, dismemberment and cannibalism, and made the case notorious across India. The Central Bureau of Investigation took over in January 2007 and concluded that Koli was a psychopath who had done the killings and that Pandher possibly had no role.
The deaths were prosecuted as separate cases. On February 12, 2009, a special sessions court in Ghaziabad convicted both men of the February 8, 2005, murder of Rimpa Haldar, fourteen, and the next day sentenced both to death; the Allahabad High Court acquitted Pandher in that case in September 2009 while upholding Koli's sentence. Koli was then convicted of the murders of Arti Prasad, seven, in May 2010; Rachna Lal, nine, in September 2010; Deepali Sarkar, twelve, in December 2010; and Chhoti Kavita, five, in December 2012, each time sentenced to death. The Supreme Court upheld his death sentence in the Haldar case in February 2011. The President rejected his mercy petition in July 2014, a death warrant was issued, and on the night before his September 12, 2014, hanging the Supreme Court stayed it at a midnight hearing; it dismissed his review petition that October. On January 28, 2015, the Allahabad High Court commuted the sentence to life because the mercy petition had taken so long. Accounts put his convictions at ten of the sixteen cases brought against him, and he received another death sentence in 2019.
On October 16, 2023, the Allahabad High Court acquitted Koli and Pandher in the remaining cases on appeal, finding nothing convincing beyond the confessions. "It appears to us," the judges wrote, "that the investigation opted for the easy course of implicating a poor servant of the house by demonising him, without taking due care of probing more serious aspects of possible involvement of organised activity of organ trading." The victims' families were stunned. "We don't have this much money that we can keep fighting for justice for so many years," said Pappu Lal, a security guard whose eight-year-old daughter was among the dead. On November 11, 2025, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice B. R. Gavai acquitted him in the last case still standing, the Haldar conviction it had upheld in 2011, holding that the confession had not been voluntary, and he was released the next day after almost nineteen years in custody.
On September 18, 2026, Koli was found dead, hanging inside the tea stall he ran in Haridwar, Uttarakhand. His death has been reported as a suicide. No one stands convicted of any of the Nithari killings.