Surender Koli was a domestic servant from the hills of Uttarakhand who became the principal accused in the Nithari case. In the last days of December 2006, after years of complaints from parents that their children were disappearing, remains were found at Nithari, a village on the edge of Noida in Uttar Pradesh, just outside Delhi. Koli and his employer, the businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, were arrested. The Central Bureau of Investigation took over the inquiry within days and charged Koli in sixteen cases of murder, with other charges.
Over the next fifteen years, trial courts in Ghaziabad convicted Koli in case after case and sentenced him to death repeatedly. In 2011 the Supreme Court confirmed one of those death sentences, and in September 2014 he came within hours of execution. Then the case fell apart. In October 2023 the Allahabad High Court acquitted him in twelve cases, describing the investigation as a betrayal of public trust. In July 2025 the Supreme Court upheld those acquittals, and on November 11, 2025, it recalled its own 2011 judgment and acquitted him in the last case still standing against him. No conviction stands against Koli for any of the Nithari deaths, and none stands against Pandher. The families of the children are left without an answer to who was responsible. Koli was found dead in Haridwar on September 18, 2026.
Koli came from Mangrukhal village in Almora district, Uttarakhand, Open magazine reported in 2026. He was 30 years old when he was arrested in December 2006, according to The Quint and The Tribune. The People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), a Delhi civil liberties group that later took up his case, described him in 2014 as a Dalit from Uttarakhand from a poor background, said he had been disowned by his family and that his elderly mother had no means to support him. A court-record chronology cited in the High Court's 2023 judgment describes him as a servant who had studied up to the seventh standard.
His employer, the Noida businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, hired Koli as a domestic worker in July 2004, ThePrint reported in 2026.
The disappearances that later formed the Nithari cases stretched over roughly two years. ThePrint reported that more than fifty girls and young women went missing from the Nithari area between 2005 and 2006 and that their parents went to the police again and again. When the National Human Rights Commission took up the matter on its own motion on January 2, 2007, it cited press reports that at least 38 children had gone missing from the village over about thirty months, that only 19 police complaints had been registered, and that five of those nineteen children had come home. The Commission said that, if the reports were true, they showed a gross violation of human rights through the failure of public servants to act in time.
The Allahabad High Court, looking back in 2023, began its chronology with the same point: there had been repeated complaints of children going missing from Nithari village, and no action was taken. One case in the record shows how slowly the police moved. A young woman identified in the High Court's judgment only by the letter L went missing on May 7, 2006. Her father had to go to court under Section 156(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure before a first information report, No. 838 of 2006, was registered on October 7, 2006.
The case did not surface through any investigation of the disappearances. According to the press reports summarized by the NHRC, it came to light by chance, when a suspect was caught with a missing woman's mobile phone. Noida police then focused on Pandher's household. The police record gives the date of Koli's arrest as December 29, 2006, between 8 and 8:15 in the morning, and of Pandher's arrest as about 11 a.m. the same day. Koli disputed this at trial and said he had been taken on December 27. The investigating officer admitted that the two men were first produced before a magistrate for remand on December 30, about thirty hours after the recorded arrests. Early on December 30 police registered a further first information report after the father of a victim identified in the judgments as Victim A lodged a report that she had been missing since October 5, 2006.
The deaths came to light at Nithari at the end of December 2006. The number of victims was a matter of public argument from the start, and reports from the period give different counts.
Anger in Nithari boiled over. On January 1, 2007, villagers fought pitched battles with police for more than three hours, throwing stones while officers with lathis tried to keep crowds back, The Tribune reported; at least twelve people and five policemen were injured. After the state announced compensation of Rs 2 lakh for each victim's family, more people from across the town came forward to say their children had also vanished. The senior superintendent of police for Noida, R.K.S. Rathore, publicly ruled out organ trading as a motive that week. The police remand of Pandher and Koli was extended to January 10.
The anger was aimed as much at the police as at the accused. Five policemen were suspended on December 30, 2006, for mishandling the inquiry, while parents said they had complained almost two years earlier, according to a timeline published by Business Standard. On January 3, 2007, after a two-member state committee headed by Home Secretary Arun Kumar Sinha found officials prima facie guilty of negligence, Chief Secretary Navin Chandra Bajpai announced further action in Lucknow. Two superintendents of police were suspended: Piyush Mordia, a former SSP of Noida, and Soumitra Yadav, the additional SP. Circle officer Sewark Ram was suspended too, and six officers were dismissed from service, among them the station house officers R.N. Singh Yadav and Deepak Chaturvedi and four sub-inspectors in charge of police outposts. The same day the central government set up a four-member committee chaired by Manjula Krishnan, a joint secretary in the Ministry of Women and Child Development, and the Noida district magistrate, Ajay Chauhan, said compensation for each family would rise to Rs 5 lakh.
On January 5, Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav ordered a CBI investigation. He promised each family a plot of land and said a demand for government jobs would be considered. Residents were angered that he had not visited the families, and a remark by his brother, the minister Shiv Pal Singh, describing the deaths as a routine matter drew criticism, including from the Union minister Renuka Chowdhury. More than a hundred people marched in protest and burned effigies of him and of Koli. Parents from Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Meerut and Delhi came to Nithari to ask about their own missing children.
In the first days of January 2007, Noida police took Pandher and Koli to the state forensic science laboratory in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, for lie-detection, narco-analysis and brain-mapping tests. The investigating officer, Deputy Superintendent Dinesh Yadav, told reporters the tests were under way. A seven-member team from the forensic science laboratory in Agra carried out an examination from January 4 to 6, 2007; the High Court later recorded that it found nothing conclusive apart from a single blood spot of unknown origin.
The Uttar Pradesh government moved the cases to the CBI on January 9, 2007, and the central government followed on January 10. The CBI re-registered the reports and took custody of both men on January 11. Its investigating officer was Superintendent Nirbhay Kumar. The agency registered nineteen cases in all, filed closure reports in three for lack of evidence and charged Koli in the remaining sixteen. Pandher was charge-sheeted in one case under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, with counts relating to bribing police officials, and was later summoned as a co-accused in five murder cases, so that he faced six trials in all.
The prosecution's case against Koli rested chiefly on two things: a confession recorded before a magistrate at Patiala House Court in New Delhi on March 1, 2007, under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and recoveries said to have been made when he pointed out places to investigators, which can be admitted under Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act. Both would be at the center of every later appeal. Defense counsel later described the confession as having come after about sixty days in custody. According to a chronology placed before the High Court, a legal aid lawyer was appointed for him that day, given a five-minute interview with him in court, and was not present when the statement was recorded.
PUDR said in 2014 that Koli had told the courts he was tortured into confessing, that he was not medically examined before or after the statement, and that it was recorded in English, a language he said he did not understand. It also said that he had repeatedly denied the charges and that lawyers who first took up his defense withdrew after threats, leaving him largely to defend himself. His later lawyer, Payoshi Roy, told ThePrint that he conducted his own cross-examinations.
The CBI's position on the employer shifted, and the shift shaped the trials. The agency's charge sheets in the murder cases named Koli, and in the first case to come to trial it gave Pandher what the press called a clean chit, arguing that he had been out of India at the relevant time. In the case of Victim A, her father filed a protest petition against the CBI's exoneration of Pandher. On May 11, 2007, the sessions judge allowed further investigation against Pandher, and on November 28, 2007, the court refused to make the police investigating officer, Dinesh Yadav, an accused. The High Court later noted that the CBI's own remand application had described a joint admission by both men, which did not fit the prosecution's later case against Koli alone.
The first Nithari case to reach a verdict concerned Rimpa Haldar, a girl from the village who went missing in early 2005. She is described as 14 in most reports and 15 in some. On February 12, 2009, a special sessions court in Ghaziabad found Koli and Pandher guilty of murder, with other charges, and on February 13, 2009, it sentenced both men to death.
On September 11, 2009, a division bench of the Allahabad High Court, Justices Imtiyaz Murtaza and Kashi Nath Singh, acquitted Pandher in that case, accepting the CBI's argument that he had not been in India at the time and finding no evidence of conspiracy, and upheld Koli's death sentence.
On February 15, 2011, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Markandey Katju and Gyan Sudha Misra dismissed Koli's appeal, held that the confession before the magistrate had been voluntary and placed the case in the "rarest of rare" category that Indian law requires for a death sentence. The court kept pending the CBI's appeal against Pandher's acquittal until the other trials were over. In November 2025 the Supreme Court would recall this judgment.
The other cases went to trial one by one before special CBI courts in Ghaziabad. According to the Business Standard timeline and a PTI chronology, Koli was sentenced to death in the second case on May 12, 2010; in the third on September 28, 2010; in the fourth on December 22, 2010; and in the fifth on December 24, 2012. In the second case, the CBI had not made Pandher a co-accused. The father of the girl in that case said he was not satisfied with the verdict and would appeal, arguing that Pandher should have been charged as well, Deccan Herald reported. In another of the early cases, Special CBI Judge A.K. Singh sentenced Koli to death and fined him Rs 10,000; Deccan Herald reported it as the fourth death sentence he had received from that court.
Further death sentences followed on October 7 and December 16, 2016. In July 2017 a special CBI court convicted Koli and Pandher together in the Victim A case and on July 24, 2017, sentenced both to death; the judge said there was no scope for their reform. A ninth case brought death sentences for both on December 8, 2017. Koli was sentenced to death again on March 2 and April 6, 2019, and in a twelfth case on January 16, 2021, in which Pandher was acquitted. On March 26, 2021, a Ghaziabad court acquitted Koli for the first time, in a thirteenth case. By the account of the public prosecutor, Jaiprakash Sharma, in 2017, nine more cases were then at various stages.
The reported dates of some of these verdicts vary from one report to another, and so do the counts. The Tribune's summary in October 2023 was that Koli had been sentenced to death in twelve cases then before the High Court, had been acquitted at trial in three, and had seen his death sentence in one, the Haldar case, commuted to life. Pandher had been acquitted at trial in three of his six cases.
After the Supreme Court's 2011 judgment, the Haldar case was the only one in which Koli's death sentence had become final. His mercy petition was rejected by the Governor of Uttar Pradesh and then, in July 2014, by President Pranab Mukherjee. On July 24, 2014, a Supreme Court bench of Justices H.L. Dattu and Anil R. Dave refused his plea to recall the 2011 judgment because it had been filed so long afterward.
A CBI court in Ghaziabad issued a death warrant. On September 4, 2014, Koli was moved from Dasna jail in Ghaziabad district to Meerut jail, where the execution was to take place; officials said it could be carried out at any time between September 7 and September 12. On September 2, 2014, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court had ruled that review petitions in death sentence cases must be heard in open court by three judges, including cases where a review had already been dismissed in chambers but the sentence had not been carried out.
On the night of Sunday, September 7, 2014, the senior advocate Indira Jaising went to the Supreme Court on Koli's behalf. An application was put before Justices Dattu and Dave at about 1 a.m., and the stay order was signed at 1:30 a.m. on September 8, "considering the urgency of the matter," IANS reported. On September 12, a three-judge bench of Chief Justice-designate Dattu, Justice Dave and Justice S.A. Bobde extended the stay to October 29 and listed the review for hearing on October 28. Koli's was the first case reopened under the new open-court rule. The review was dismissed in 2014.
The reprieve came from another direction. PUDR filed a public interest petition in the Allahabad High Court arguing that executing Koli after such a long delay in deciding his mercy petitions would violate his right to life; Koli later filed his own petition and the two were heard together. The state blamed the delay on Koli's own court petitions. On January 28, 2015, a division bench of Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice P.K.S. Baghel commuted his death sentence in the Haldar case to life imprisonment, holding that the delay in deciding the mercy petitions was a valid ground. The Uttar Pradesh government challenged the commutation in the Supreme Court, and that challenge was still pending in October 2023.
Koli's and Pandher's appeals against the later death sentences were heard together by a division bench of the Allahabad High Court, Justices Ashwani Kumar Mishra and Syed Aftab Husain Rizvi. On October 16, 2023, in a judgment of 308 pages, the bench acquitted Koli in all twelve cases before it and Pandher in the two in which he had been sentenced to death, setting the death sentences aside. The court anonymized the victims, referring to them by letters.
The bench held that the prosecution had failed to prove the guilt of either man beyond reasonable doubt. It criticized "the casual and perfunctory manner in which important aspects of arrest, recovery and confession have been dealt with," and found that the procedure for recording Koli's disclosure had been given a "complete go by," PTI reported. It called the probe "nothing short of a betrayal of public trust by responsible agencies," noted that the prosecution's stance had shifted until it fixed guilt exclusively on Koli, and said the investigation had "opted for the easy course of implicating a poor servant of the house by demonising him," without probing the "possible involvement of organised activity of organ trading."
Pandher, then 65 and being treated for tuberculosis in jail, walked out of Luksar jail in Greater Noida at about 1:40 p.m. on October 20, 2023, after the second release order reached the jail superintendent, Arun Pratap Singh. Koli stayed in prison. His life sentence in the Haldar case was untouched by the 2023 judgment.
The CBI filed twelve appeals against the acquittals, and two more were filed privately, one of them by the father of one of the children; the families were represented by the senior advocate Geeta Luthra. The Supreme Court issued notice in May 2024 and began hearing the appeals on April 3, 2025. On July 30, 2025, a bench of Chief Justice B.R. Gavai and Justices Satish Chandra Sharma and K. Vinod Chandran dismissed all fourteen. The Chief Justice said that in an appeal against acquittal the challengers had to show that the High Court's judgment was perverse, and that they had not done so. The bench observed that a recovery can be attributed to an accused under Section 27 only if the place was known to him alone.
With those acquittals final, Pandher stood acquitted in every case against him. Koli remained in prison on the one conviction left, the Haldar case.
Koli then filed a curative petition, the last remedy available in the Supreme Court after an appeal and a review have failed. He argued that two outcomes resting on the same evidence could not both stand. On October 7, 2025, a bench of Chief Justice Gavai and Justices Surya Kant and Vikram Nath heard the petition, observed that an anomalous situation had arisen, noted that the conviction rested largely on a statement and the recovery of a kitchen knife, and reserved its order; the Chief Justice remarked that the matter deserved to be allowed "in a minute." Additional Solicitor General Rajkumar Bhaskar Thakare appeared for the CBI.
On November 11, 2025, the same bench allowed the petition in Surendra Koli v. State of Uttar Pradesh, in a judgment written by Justice Vikram Nath. It recalled and set aside its own judgment of February 15, 2011, and its 2014 order dismissing the review, set aside the trial court's 2009 judgment and the High Court's September 2009 judgment, acquitted Koli of all charges in the case and ordered his release unless he was wanted in another matter.
The court held that the Section 164 confession had been recorded after about sixty days of continuous police custody without meaningful legal aid, that the magistrate had not recorded the clear satisfaction about voluntariness the law requires, that the investigating officer's closeness to the recording compromised it, and that the statement itself referred repeatedly to tutoring and earlier coercion. It held the recoveries inadmissible: no disclosure memo made at the time had been proved, a later seizure memo conflicted with the remand papers, and the police and members of the public already knew of the places involved before Koli was brought there, so they were not discoveries made by the accused. Expert searches had produced no forensic traces consistent with the prosecution's account, and DNA testing by the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics in Hyderabad had helped identify some of the dead but did not show who was responsible. Keeping a conviction on evidence the court had rejected in identical circumstances, it held, would offend the guarantees of equality and of life and personal liberty in Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution.
"Suspicion, however grave, cannot replace proof," the bench said. "Criminal law does not permit conviction on conjecture or on a hunch." It said that negligence and delay had narrowed the path to the truth, that an organ trade angle flagged by a government-appointed panel was never seriously pursued, and that "it is a matter of deep regret that despite prolonged investigation, the identity of the actual perpetrator has not been established in a manner that meets the legal standards."
Koli left Luksar jail at about 7:20 p.m. on Wednesday, November 12, 2025, accompanied by his lawyers, The Tribune reported, quoting the jail superintendent. No family member was waiting at the gate, and he did not speak to reporters. He had spent nearly nineteen years in custody, most of it in Dasna jail in Ghaziabad, with a brief spell in Meerut and, from September 2024, in Luksar; the Luksar superintendent, Brajesh Singh, later told PTI that his behavior there had been normal.
His lawyer, Payoshi Roy, told ThePrint that he and his family had been "destroyed entirely, with the media playing a big role in this," and that "it is not a story with a happy ending." India has no law guaranteeing compensation for wrongful imprisonment, The Federal noted; the Law Commission recommended one in its 277th report in 2018.
For the families of Nithari, the acquittals closed the courts' path without answering the question they had asked since 2006. After the Supreme Court's ruling in November 2025, the father of a ten-year-old victim told PTI that his family had no hope left and had accepted defeat, and asked who had killed the children if not the accused. He said he had sold property and borrowed money while waiting for justice. The girl's mother said the family had never recovered and had not received justice. Another parent said the acquittal made it seem as though the children had never existed. A neighbor told PTI that parents had kept their children indoors for years.
After his release Koli moved to Haridwar, Uttarakhand, where he lived in the Bhupatwala area. Outlook reported that he went by the name Sada Ram, told an acquaintance he was from Almora, briefly took security guard jobs, and later worked at a tea stall that, according to The Federal and Outlook, was run under another man's name. He was found dead in Haridwar on September 18, 2026.
The Nithari case ended without any finding of who was responsible for the deaths. The Supreme Court's 2025 judgment did not declare Koli innocent; it held that the prosecution had not proved its case to the legal standard, and that the true offender had not been identified.
The organ trade question was never settled. The SSP ruled it out in the first week of January 2007, but the High Court in 2023 criticized the investigation for not probing it, and the Supreme Court in 2025 noted that the angle, flagged by a government-appointed panel, was not seriously pursued.
Koli's confession, once the core of the prosecution, was found by the High Court and then the Supreme Court to be involuntary and tainted by tutoring. Koli said he had been tortured into making it.
The numbers themselves remain uncertain. The CBI registered nineteen cases and prosecuted sixteen. The NHRC cited press reports of 38 missing children in January 2007, and ThePrint later put the number of girls and young women reported missing from the area at more than fifty. Reports of the death sentences and their dates differ, and Rimpa Haldar's age is given as both 14 and 15.
July 2004: Moninder Singh Pandher hires Surender Koli as a domestic worker in Noida.
2005 to 2006: Children and young women go missing from Nithari village; parents' complaints go largely unregistered.
Early 2005: Rimpa Haldar goes missing.
May 7, 2006: A young woman identified in court as L goes missing; a police report is registered only on October 7, 2006, after her father goes to court.
December 29, 2006: Koli and Pandher are arrested at Nithari, according to the police record (Koli said December 27).
December 30, 2006: Five policemen are suspended; the two men are produced for remand.
January 1, 2007: Clashes between villagers and police at Nithari.
January 2, 2007: The NHRC takes up the case on its own motion.
January 3, 2007: Two superintendents of police and a circle officer are suspended and six officers dismissed; a central committee under Manjula Krishnan is formed.
January 5, 2007: Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav orders a CBI investigation.
January 11, 2007: The CBI takes over and takes custody of both men.
March 1, 2007: Koli's confession is recorded before a magistrate in New Delhi.
February 12 and 13, 2009: Koli and Pandher are convicted and sentenced to death in the Rimpa Haldar case, Ghaziabad.
September 11, 2009: The Allahabad High Court acquits Pandher in that case and upholds Koli's death sentence.
May 12, 2010 to December 24, 2012: Koli is sentenced to death in four more cases.
February 15, 2011: The Supreme Court upholds Koli's death sentence in the Haldar case.
July 2014: The President rejects Koli's mercy plea; on July 24 the Supreme Court refuses to recall its 2011 judgment.
September 8, 2014: The Supreme Court stays the execution at a night hearing.
January 28, 2015: The Allahabad High Court commutes the Haldar death sentence to life imprisonment.
2016 to 2019: Further death sentences; on July 24, 2017, Koli and Pandher are sentenced to death in the Victim A case.
January 16, 2021: Koli's twelfth death sentence; Pandher acquitted in that case.
March 26, 2021: Koli acquitted at trial for the first time.
October 16, 2023: The Allahabad High Court acquits Koli in twelve cases and Pandher in two.
October 20, 2023: Pandher is released.
July 30, 2025: The Supreme Court dismisses fourteen appeals against the acquittals.
November 11, 2025: The Supreme Court allows Koli's curative petition and acquits him in the Haldar case.
November 12, 2025: Koli is released from Luksar jail.
September 18, 2026: Koli is found dead in Haridwar.