Nithari: Supreme Court rejects killer Koli's mercy plea

New tales at House of Horror

On October 9, 2014, a dilapidated bungalow in Nithari –now covered with weeds and shrubs – was again a gawping destination for its neighbours, years after severed torsos, eye-less heads and rumours of cannibalism had turned it into India's House of Horror.

It was a scene straight out of Dante's Inferno as a raging blaze destroyed D5, a house once owned by Moninder Pandher, and his servant, Surinder Koli, both accused in abduction, rape and murder of 17 women.
It was India's biggest, reported case of female murders, coupled with suspicion of a flourishing organ trade and streaks of alleged cannibalism.

Desperately trying to peep through thick columns of smoke to make sense of the blaze was Jhabbu Lal, a clothes presser ironer, whose daughter Jyoti was among those killed.

Lal wept inconsolably, remembering when (on December 29, 2006) his son had chanced upon in a huge dustbin on the roof of D5 carrying Jyoti's blood stained clothes and colourful bangles many wear during Dusherra.
The nightmare never far from his mind, Lal – for some peculiar reasons – kept on egging onlookers to get inside the house and see if something could be retrieved.

It seemed to Lal, the fire, which – ironically – happened nearly a fortnight after Pandher's release on bail, had destroyed the last straw of evidence from that haunted house.

His friends held him back, repeatedly reminding him the investigation was over and the case is in court. But Lal would not listen.

To him, the murder house had not lost its notoriety and could offer more answers to parents of victims than what they had been told.

"I had lost my senses. It seemed to me Pandher and Koli were still there, sipping my daughter's blood to gain immortality," says Lal. He remembers Jyoti wanted to become a doctor.

"My husband still believes our daughter is still there, somewhere under the floorboards," says Sarita Devi, Lal's wife.

Pandher is out on bail, probably on pilgrimages India. And in faraway Indian Capital, the country's apex court today rejected a petition by against Koli, already sentenced by a UP court.

The trials, arguably, have been sensational.

Troubled by shoddy investigation by the police in Nithari, the UP government on 3 January 2007 dismissed six police personnel and suspended three senior officers. Those suspended that time were SSP Piyush Mordia, who was SSP Noida, ASP Saumitra Yadav and Circle Officer Sewak Ram Yadav. Also dismissed were former chowki in-charges at Nithari Rajvir Baliyan, Kamarpal Singh, Vinod Pandey and Simranjit Kaur. Two station house officers at Noida's Sector 20, RN Singh Yadav and Deepak Chaturvedi, also were sacked. Worse, a Tehelka-StarNews investigation showed cops messing up the case after taking bribes, some as low as Rs 300,000 per police officer, from Pandher.

Still, contentious issues plagued the cases, almost like that of Noida's other much-publicized murder of Arushi Talwar.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which also probed the case from the UP Police, gave Pandher a clean chit before applications filed by an intrepid lawyer, Khalid Khan, turned on the heat and pushed Pandher behind bars.

The flip flop in the courts troubled many, especially those who lost their children.

Among them was Anil Halder, father of Rimpa, one of the first victims of Nithari murders.

Halder, who often sits expressionless on a slice of land close Noida's expensive golf course, has flowers to sell, a rickety auto rickshaw to drive and a nightmare to carry lifelong.

He has spent a little over Rs 15 lacs in court and lawyer fees, smashed – in sheer disgust – Molotov cocktails on cars carrying local police and CBI officers and is firmly reconciled to the fact that the poor gets no justice in India.

"I do not trust anyone, not even the Gods," says Halder, seconds later he breaks down into a paroxysm of sobbing.

In each city, it is a civic duty to clean the drains. But in Nithari, claims Halder, Koli and Pandher routinely bribed the sweepers, who turned their vans away, a fact corroborated by an Expert Committee of bureaucrats formed by the Ministry of Woman and Child.

"The nullah in front and back of the hose are not very deep and have stagnant water. It was also not cleaned for a very long time by the civic authorities," cited the report.

No one took notice. The UP police and CBI ignored the findings. The courts – expectedly – followed the same course.

"It seemed to me everyone was trying to erase the importance of such vital findings.How come we do not hear about Maya Sarcar, the maid who worked at D5 for a little over seven years," asks Halder.

He has a point. A vital cog in the wheels of Nithari investigations, Sarcar was let off by the UP police and eventually, by the CBI.

The expert committee was aghast: "The interrogation made by UP police of the maid servant of the house, Maya Sarcar, needs to be looked into for revelations into the activities of the accused."

Still, no one tracked her.

Halder says he is psyched out. It is extremely hard for him to forget what happened in D5, what ruined his life, and that of his family.

His wife, Dolly, is a chronic neurotic patient who has to be tied to bed during fits. Unable to face the trauma, one son has returned to their ancestral village in Bengal's Nadia district while another son, now in class XI, vividly remembers those nightmarish days and is unable to concentrate on his studies.

No one should knock his door at Nithari uninvited. "My wife would abuse, even kill you with a boti (a cutting instrument prevalent in Bengal)."

In faraway Mangrukhal village in Uttarakhand's Almora district, 68 year old Kunti Devi, Kohli's mother, regrets her son's involvement in the murders and says law will take its own course.

"I refused to give my thumb impression on his death petition from the courts after the president rejected his mercy plea. No mother can do it. But if it is proved he killed the children, he should be hanged," says 68-year-old Kunti Devi who recently met her son at the Meerut jail. The Koli family is in total disarray, his brothers refusing to meet him because of the social stigma.

As per cases filed in various northern Indian courts, 17 children were killed, possibly raped and organs removed during 2005-2006 in Nithari, an obscure neighborhood full of ironmonger stores.

In some cases, it was alleged by news channels that both Koli and Pandher even froze portions of the bodies and eventually cooked them for a meal. But the charges have still not been proved in a court of law.
Lal and Halder remember those days.

The children were missing, one after another.

Like the winter smog that hangs all over north India, a pall of gloom hung over Nithari for nearly a year. Where are our children, everyone asked? Hired soothsayers filled their pockets with cash, did some ritualistic mumbo jumbo, some parents even went to the venerated shrine of Vaishno Devi and sought blessings from the cave goddess. But the end result was blank.

Then, all parents gathered one morning and spent three hours to take a head count of missing children. They calculated 35. Many shuddered at the thought of them being trafficked, the women wailed inconsolably in what looked like a scene of total despair.

And then, on the morning of December 29, 2006, Halder accompanied cops who had traced the handset of another missing teenager. It led them to D5, Pandher's home that – ironically – was next to that of a lawyer and a doctor, Dr SP Chowdhury, once charged by the UP for being involved in organ trade.

It was a nicely decorated room, the cops found nothing except cartoons of expensive whiskey. The fridge was stuffed with marinated fish and chicken, it seemed owners of the house lived on a-party-a-day.

And then, a cop found something inside a huge dustbin on the roof: a few severed heads, including that of the last girl who went missing. Rimpa's clothes, crumpled in a trunk, were also found on the roof. Halder fainted on seeing the clothes.

"Hanging Koli will kill a vital element of the cases. What about those who were a part of this organ trade?" asks Halder.

The organ trade angle is one of the main points raised by the Expert Committee whose findings now gather dust.

"It seems that the unsolved cases where quickly attributed to Koli and the number of killings done by him was increased from 11 to 17 to account for the unsolved cases of missing children," says the expert committee report.

Lal says clothes from Pandher's home always had bloodstains. Koli said those were chicken blood because Pandher stood close to the butcher.

"We believed him, wish we had not," says Devi.