On Wednesday, July 30, 2025, the Supreme Court of India upheld the Allahabad High Court’s decision to acquit Moninder Singh Pandher and Surendra Koli, two individuals initially convicted in the horrific 2006 Nithari serial murders case. This ruling came despite appeals from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Uttar Pradesh government, and the families of several victims who sought to challenge the High Court’s judgment. The decision marks a significant moment in a case that has gripped the nation for nearly two decades, leaving families of the victims in anguish and raising questions about the investigation’s integrity.

The Supreme Court’s three-judge bench, led by Chief Justice BR Gavai, along with Justices KV Viswanathan and N Kotiswar Singh, carefully reviewed the case. They concluded that “there was no perversity in findings of the high court”, affirming the Allahabad High Court’s reasoning for acquitting Pandher and Koli. This statement reflects the court’s confidence in the High Court’s assessment that the evidence presented was insufficient to uphold the convictions.

The Nithari case first shocked the nation in December 2006, when skeletal remains and body parts of several young girls and children were discovered in a drain behind Pandher’s residence in Nithari, a village in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Moninder Singh Pandher, a businessman, and his domestic help, Surendra Koli, were arrested and charged with the rape and murder of multiple victims, primarily children from poor families in the area. In 2009, a trial court in Ghaziabad sentenced both to death, citing the gruesome nature of the crimes, which included allegations of sexual assault and even cannibalism. The case sent shockwaves across India, with the public demanding justice for the victims.

However, the legal journey took a turn when the Supreme Court intervened, converting the death sentences to life imprisonment due to significant delays in deciding the mercy petitions and executing the sentences. The court’s decision was based on the principle that prolonged delays in such cases violate the rights of the accused. This ruling provided temporary relief to Pandher and Koli, but the case remained far from resolved.

In a dramatic development in October 2023, the Allahabad High Court acquitted Pandher and Koli after they filed fresh appeals. The High Court’s bench, comprising Justices Ashwani Kumar Mishra and Syed Aftab Husain Rizvi, stated that “there was no evidence linking them to the murders apart from their confessions” and highlighted critical flaws in the investigation. The court noted that “there were no eyewitnesses and insufficient forensic/scientific evidence to link the accused to the crimes”, calling the investigation “botched and unreliable”. The High Court criticized the prosecution for failing to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and described the probe as a “betrayal of public trust by responsible agencies.” This acquittal overturned Koli’s death sentences in 12 cases and Pandher’s in two, allowing Pandher to walk free, while Koli remained in custody due to a pending life sentence in one case.

The CBI, the Uttar Pradesh government, and the victims’ families refused to accept the High Court’s verdict and filed a total of “14 petitions” in the Supreme Court to challenge the acquittals. Among the petitioners was Pappu Lal, the father of one of the victims, who sought justice for his daughter. Despite these efforts, the Supreme Court found no grounds to overturn the High Court’s decision. The apex court agreed that the prosecution’s case relied heavily on confessions, which were deemed unreliable, and lacked corroborating evidence such as eyewitness accounts or conclusive forensic findings. The court’s dismissal of the appeals has left the victims’ families devastated, with many feeling that justice remains out of reach nearly two decades after the tragedy.

The Nithari case has been a long and painful saga for the families of the victims, who have endured years of legal battles and emotional trauma. The discovery of the remains in 2006 sparked outrage, with locals accusing the police of negligence for failing to act on earlier reports of missing children. The case’s transfer to the CBI in January 2007 was meant to ensure a thorough investigation, but the High Court’s scathing remarks about the “botched” probe have cast a shadow over the agencies involved. For families like that of Pappu Lal and others, such as Ashok Kumar, who lost his five-year-old son, and Durga Prasad, whose seven-year-old daughter was killed, the Supreme Court’s ruling feels like a final blow to their hopes for accountability.

This ruling closes a significant chapter in one of India’s most notorious criminal cases, but it also raises broader questions about the justice system’s ability to deliver closure in complex cases. The victims’ families, who have fought tirelessly, now face the painful reality of moving forward without the answers they sought. Meanwhile, the Nithari murders remain a haunting reminder of the lives lost and the challenges of securing justice in the face of investigative shortcomings.

The House of Horrors: Unraveling the Nithari Murder Mystery

In the mid-2000s, a quiet village on the outskirts of Noida became gripped by a chilling mystery. Children and young women from Nithari, a semi-urban slum area in Uttar Pradesh, started disappearing without a trace. Distraught parents scoured the narrow lanes with photographs of their missing loved ones, only to be met with indifference and incredulity from local authorities. Some police officers dismissed the reports, suggesting the children were not abducted at all but had run away after family quarrels. Meanwhile, fear and whispers spread through the community – something evil was lurking in their midst, and it seemed centered around a particular house in Sector-31, Noida.

One of the missing was a 22-year-old woman known as Payal. On May 7, 2006, Payal left home in a salwar suit with her trusty Nokia phone after receiving a call from a local domestic helper, Surinder Koli, who had promised to help her brother find a job. When she failed to return by nightfall, her father Nand Lal grew alarmed. He learned from a sympathetic auto-rickshaw driver that his daughter had been dropped off that day at bungalow D-5 in Nithari – the home of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher – and that a “dark-skinned man” (fitting Koli’s description) had greeted her at the gate. Convinced something terrible had happened inside D-5, Nand Lal launched a tireless crusade for answers. He made repeated trips to the local police station and even petitioned the Prime Minister and President for help. Yet months crawled by with no action. A formal missing-person FIR for Payal was only filed in October 2006, a full five months after her disappearance. By then, she was one of dozens of children and young adults who had vanished around Nithari since 2005, their families’ pleas for help largely ignored.

A Grisly Discovery (December 2006)

On the morning of December 29, 2006, frustration gave way to horror. Acting on a tip from two local residents – both fathers of missing girls – a search party ventured behind the walls of bungalow D-5. What they uncovered would haunt India: a decomposed human hand and other skeletal remains scattered near the house’s drain and a municipal water tank. The shocked residents alerted the police, essentially forcing law enforcement to confront what the community had feared all along. As word spread, anxious parents rushed to the scene, clutching photos of their children and praying for any scrap of news.

Police descended on the site and soon exhumed eight skeletons worth of bones and skulls from the foul sludge of the drain adjacent to D-5. Children’s clothing and personal items – including what appeared to be Payal’s red purse – were pulled from the muck. Stunned by the gruesome evidence, authorities immediately arrested the bungalow’s occupants: Moninder Singh Pandher, the wealthy owner of the house, and Surinder Koli, his live-in domestic servant. The two men were taken into custody as prime suspects in what was now clearly a series of murders.

Nithari’s darkest suspicions had been confirmed. The nondescript white bungalow at D-5 was quickly dubbed the “House of Horrors” by screaming headlines. Over the next days, under intense media glare, more human remains were dredged up from the surrounding drains and backyard of the property. By New Year’s Eve, skeletal parts of at least 16 victims – mostly children – had been recovered, though police were not immediately able to say exactly how many individuals that number represented. The entire country watched in morbid shock as images of forensic teams gathering bones in D-5’s courtyard flashed on television. The scale of the crime was almost unfathomable – a serial killing spree targeting the most vulnerable, right under the nose of a busy city.

The Investigation Unfolds: Local Lapses and a CBI Takeover

The initial response from authorities was marked by chaos and outrage. Villagers, furious that their earlier warnings had been ignored, gathered in angry mobs outside the House of Horrors. They pelted stones at the gate and even scuffled with police in a cathartic release of long-simmering rage. It emerged that some officers had indeed been informed – repeatedly – about children going missing near Pandher’s home over the past two years, but they failed to act. Amid the public furor, at least two local policemen were suspended for negligence on December 31, 2006. A government panel confirmed serious lapses in how missing-person cases were handled in Noida, concluding that the local police had “failed in their duty” to investigate the disappearances. The Uttar Pradesh state administration moved swiftly to contain the damage: by the first week of January 2007, multiple senior officers were disciplined or dismissed for dereliction of duty.

Under mounting pressure from the public and media, the case was handed over to India’s elite investigators, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), on January 10, 2007. The CBI, unconvinced by the sloppy initial work, literally went back to the crime scene with fresh eyes. Within 48 hours of taking charge, CBI teams scoured the drains around D-5 once more and found even more ghastly evidence: three additional skulls and numerous human bones – including severed limbs and torsos wrapped in polythene bags. Investigators also uncovered personal artifacts believed to belong to the victims, such as clothing and ID items, which later helped match remains to names. By now, it was clear that the killings had followed a disturbingly systematic pattern and that the full tally of victims might never be known.

Early interrogation of the suspects yielded a horrifying confession. Surinder Koli – who had been living in a small outhouse on Pandher’s property – confessed in a recorded statement on March 1, 2007 that he alone had lured, sexually assaulted, and killed at least six children and one woman over the past year. The manner of the crimes was almost beyond belief: Koli described how he would befriend kids from the neighborhood (often offering sweets or chocolate), then strangle or bludgeon them inside the bungalow, commit unspeakable acts with the corpses, dismember the bodies with “butcher-like precision,” and dispose of the parts in the backyard or drain. In chilling detail, he spoke of necrophilia and cannibalism – claiming that he had sex with the corpses, cooked flesh from the bodies, and eaten it before dumping the remains. This gruesome admission shocked even veteran investigators. CBI officials described Koli as a likely psychopath who had carried out the killings methodically.

Throughout these revelations, Moninder Singh Pandher – the middle-aged businessman who owned the house – maintained that he was innocent and largely unaware of Koli’s monstrous deeds. Pandher insisted he had been away or oblivious during many of the crimes, painting himself as a hapless employer duped by a homicidal servant. Notably, early in the CBI’s probe some interrogators echoed this possibility: in January 2007, one CBI officer remarked it was “possible that Pandher had no role to play in the murders,” implying Koli might have acted alone. Indeed, the CBI’s initial chargesheets did not name Pandher as an active participant in most of the murders, focusing primarily on Koli. But given the heinous nature of the crimes and public anger, suspicion continued to swirl around Pandher – was he truly ignorant, or could he have been an accomplice or enabler? Those questions would resurface dramatically in the trials to come.

Forensic Findings and “House of Horrors” Evidence

As investigators dug deeper, forensic teams worked to untangle the macabre puzzle of bones and bodies. Experts from AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) and the CFSL (Central Forensic Science Laboratory) converged on the site, meticulously recovering human remains and cataloguing every fragment. In total, 17 skulls were eventually retrieved – 16 intact and 1 damaged – indicating at least 17 victims. Post-mortem examinations of the bones showed a recurring method: most of the bodies had been cut or sawed into three pieces each (head, torso, limbs) before disposal. The dismemberment was executed with a startling degree of skill, which initially fueled lurid speculation about an organ trafficking racket. The cuts were so clean and precise that doctors likened them to a butcher’s work, raising theories that the killers might have been harvesting organs for sale.

These rumors of organ trade gripped the public imagination in early 2007 – after all, why else would someone target so many children unless profiting from their body parts? At one point, investigators even detained a local doctor who had previously been accused in a kidney-transplant racket, suspecting he might be connected. However, exhaustive searches of that doctor’s property turned up nothing, and the organ-trade theory began to falter. Forensic clues pointed in a different direction: the fact that entire torsos and internal organs were found rotting in plastic bags indicated the bodies were simply dumped, not carefully stripped for organs. The CBI eventually concluded there was no credible evidence of a larger organ-harvesting syndicate behind the Nithari killings. All signs instead pointed to a lone serial predator acting on perverse impulses – namely Koli – though possibly enabled by his employer’s negligence or worse.

DNA testing was crucial in identifying the young victims of the House of Horrors. Samples from bones, teeth, and strands of hair were sent to advanced labs like the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics in Hyderabad. Miraculously, investigators managed to put names to many of the remains by matching DNA with the blood of parents who had come forward. By January 2007, 15 of the 17 skulls had been tentatively identified. Koli himself, when confronted with photographs of the missing, coldly pointed out 10 children he remembered killing. The other victims were identified by their clothing and personal belongings recovered from the scene – a slipper, a bracelet, a pocket diary, each item carrying a heartbreaking story. It turned out the victims were overwhelmingly female and painfully young. Of the confirmed dead, 11 were girls (most under the age of 10), and only one – Payal – was an adult. The rest were little boys and girls who had lived in the shadows of a metropolis, only to meet a ghastly fate.

As these forensic revelations came to light, the media transformed the Nithari case into a nationwide spectacle. grisly details of rape, necrophilia, cannibalism, and child-murder dominated news cycles. Journalists christened the suspect Koli with demonic epithets like the “Nithari Monster,” and the D-5 bungalow became forever infamous as India’s own “House of Horrors”. Every new discovery – a skull here, a bag of bones there – was broadcast in sensational detail, feeding an atmosphere of suspense and dread. Could there be more bodies lurking undiscovered? Were there other accomplices or killers on the loose? The mystery and terror surrounding Nithari even caught international attention. (A British documentary crew later titled their film “Slumdog Cannibal”, underscoring how the case had seared itself into the global imagination.) For many in India, the Nithari killings became a grim mirror, reflecting deep societal fears about child safety, institutional apathy, and the potential for monstrosity hiding in plain sight.

Trials and Tribulations: Courtroom Drama and Death Sentences

Once the initial shock subsided, the Nithari case moved into the slow, labyrinthine corridors of the Indian justice system. The CBI filed 19 separate FIRs (First Information Reports) – one for each identified victim – and eventually brought charges in 16 individual murder cases against Koli (and in a few against Pandher). Rather than one big trial, the law mandated that each victim’s case be tried and judged on its own evidence. This set the stage for a marathon legal saga that would span nearly two decades.

The first trial to reach a verdict concerned the murder of 14-year-old Rimpa Haldar, who had disappeared in 2005. On February 12, 2009, a special CBI court in Ghaziabad delivered a dramatic judgment: both Surinder Koli and Moninder Singh Pandher were found guilty of Rimpa’s abduction, rape and murder. The very next day, the court pronounced the sentence: death penalty for both men, declaring the crimes met the “rarest of rare” standard reserved for the most heinous offenses. Pandher, who had been given a virtual clean chit by CBI investigators in their charge-sheet, was visibly stunned to be convicted alongside Koli. The judge, however, found sufficient circumstantial evidence tying Pandher to at least this murder – possibly because it occurred while he was present – and held that both master and servant were complicit in the killing. This initial death sentence set the tone. Over the next few years, trial courts would go on to convict Surinder Koli in one case after another as the prosecutions for each victim concluded. By 2010, Koli had been handed multiple death sentences – for example, for the murder of 7-year-old Arti in 2006 and 9-year-old Rachna in 2006, each verdict adding another execution order to his name. Case after case, the pattern of ghastly evidence repeated and so did the outcome: Koli was condemned to die again and again. By 2014, he had accumulated at least five separate death sentences, and ultimately by 2022 this tally would rise to 13 death penalties in total.

Pandher’s legal fortunes, meanwhile, seesawed unpredictably. After his 2009 conviction in the Rimpa Haldar case, he appealed to the Allahabad High Court and won a reprieve within months. In September 2009, the High Court acquitted Moninder Singh Pandher of Rimpa’s murder, overturning his death sentence due to lack of evidence of direct involvement. The High Court noted that Pandher had not initially been named as a main suspect by the CBI and was dragged into the trial later; given the benefit of doubt, he walked free (in that case) while Koli’s death penalty was affirmed on appeal. This acquittal of Pandher was deeply controversial – the victims’ families were aghast, and many in the public felt that a rich man had wriggled out of accountability. However, other trials still loomed for Pandher. Responding to pleas from victim families, lower courts summoned Pandher to stand as an accused in at least five other Nithari cases over the years. In some of those, evidence was even thinner. Pandher was eventually convicted in only two of the Nithari cases (aside from the initial Rimpa trial) – one being the murder of a 25-year-old domestic helper, for which a CBI court in 2017 sentenced him to death, and another where he received a seven-year prison term. But these convictions, too, would face intense scrutiny on appeal.

As the trials slogged on into the 2010s, a peculiar situation emerged: Surinder Koli remained on death row, repeatedly facing execution dates, while appeals and retrials kept Moninder Singh Pandher in and out of jail. In July 2014, India’s President rejected Koli’s clemency petition, clearing the last hurdle for carrying out his sentence. A death warrant was signed scheduling Koli’s hanging for September 12, 2014, and he was moved to Meerut Jail for the execution – the specter of Nithari’s “monster” finally facing the noose. But in a dramatic 11th-hour twist, human rights lawyers intervened. Just hours before the execution, renowned advocate Indira Jaising pleaded to the Supreme Court for a review, arguing that inordinate delays (over 8 years) in deciding Koli’s mercy petition had violated his rights. In a rare late-night hearing on September 8, 2014, the Supreme Court stayed Koli’s hanging with mere hours to spare. The case ignited debate – after so many gruesome crimes and confessions, did this killer deserve mercy due to procedural delay? By January 2015, the Allahabad High Court answered that question by commuting Surinder Koli’s dozens of death sentences to life imprisonment. The bench, notably led by Justice D. Y. Chandrachud (now Chief Justice of India), ruled it would be unconstitutional to execute Koli after such prolonged delays and lapses in due process. Thus, Koli’s life was spared – for the time being – though he remained behind bars serving life terms.

Meanwhile, the sheer length of the Nithari trials was itself a source of tragedy. Over 2,000 court hearings took place across 13+ years of trial proceedings, an extraordinary marathon that tested the endurance of victims’ families. One by one, verdicts trickled in: Koli continued to be found guilty in case after case through the late 2010s, even as he was technically no longer facing execution. By 2019, he had received his tenth formal death sentence from the trial court (later converted to life). The trials finally concluded in 2022 when the CBI court finished hearing all 16 cases tied to Nithari. At that point, the scorecard stood something like this: Surinder Koli convicted in 13 out of 16 cases (the other 3 cases yielding acquittals), and Moninder Singh Pandher convicted in 2 out of 5 cases against him. Both men, however, immediately appealed these verdicts, maintaining their stance that they were not guilty of the horrific crimes.

Final Twist: Acquittals and Unanswered Questions (2023–2025)

In a denouement that few saw coming, the Nithari murder saga took a stunning turn nearly two decades after the crimes. On October 16, 2023, the Allahabad High Court pronounced that both Surinder Koli and Moninder Singh Pandher would be acquitted of all charges in the Nithari serial killings. The courtroom fell silent as the justices delivered an excoriating verdict – not against the accused, but against the investigation itself. The High Court judges ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, citing “insufficient evidence” and a “botched up” investigation rife with errors. Crucially, the confessions and grisly statements that had so captivated the public were deemed legally unreliable. Apart from those confessions, the judges said, there was simply no direct evidence linking Koli or Pandher to the murders in a manner that satisfied the strict standards of criminal proof.

The High Court’s judgment read like a scathing indictment of the investigative agencies. In their order, the judges noted the “casual and perfunctory” manner in which critical procedures were handled – from arrests to recoveries of evidence. They suggested that investigators had “opted for the easy course of implicating a poor servant... by demonising him” instead of thoroughly probing other leads. In other words, the possibility of a broader organized crime – for instance, the organ trade angle – was not pursued with the rigor it deserved, leaving gaps and reasonable doubt. The verdict was not declaring the two men innocent saints; rather, it was a damning statement that the case against them had not been built on solid, admissible evidence. Much of the physical evidence (like the bones) was recovered from open areas that others could access, and key procedures (such as properly witnessing the recovery of victim belongings on the suspects’ indication) had not been followed, making the evidence legally weak. In sum, after 17 years, India’s “house of horrors” case collapsed under the weight of its own investigational failings.

For the families of the victims, the High Court’s acquittal ruling was devastating. They had endured years of graphic testimony and repeated promises that justice would be served, only to see the accused walk free. “We don’t have this much money to keep fighting for justice for so many years,” lamented Pappu Lal, whose eight-year-old daughter was killed, as he grappled with the court’s decision. Another grieving father, Durga Prasad – who lost his seven-year-old – seethed, “This court might have acquitted those monsters but there is a bigger court of God that will not spare them”. Their anguish was shared by many across the nation who still vividly remembered the tiny faces of the Nithari children and the ghastly details that had once dominated headlines. The acquittals prompted widespread debate: Had justice been denied, or had the legal system correctly applied the principle that ten guilty men should go free rather than one innocent man be wrongly punished? Could there truly be any innocence for men who had confessed to such awful deeds, or was there more to the story that would forever remain unknown?

The prosecution – in this case the CBI and Uttar Pradesh government – was not ready to give up. They filed a flurry of appeals to the Supreme Court, challenging the High Court’s acquittal of Koli and Pandher. However, in a final coda to the saga, the Supreme Court of India upheld the acquittals. On July 30, 2025, the Supreme Court dismissed the CBI’s plea, effectively closing the book on the case with no conviction upheld. The apex court emphasized that under law, recoveries of evidence have to be unquestionably linked to the accused – and in Nithari, too many of the key discoveries (like the skulls in the open drain) could not be exclusively attributed to information from Koli. With those words, the last hope of re-prosecuting the duo vanished. After nearly two decades, both men were legally cleared of the serial murder charges.

And so the Nithari murder mystery ends, not with the slam of a jail door but with an unsettling sense of incompleteness. The bungalow at D-5 Nithari still stands, now abandoned and overgrown with weeds, a mute witness to unspeakable horror. Its infamy as the “house of horrors” lingers, a chilling chapter in India’s true-crime lore. Yet officially, no one is convicted of the 2005–06 child murders of Nithari. The case stands as a grim reminder of how investigative lapses and circumstantial evidence can let even the most horrific crimes slip through the cracks of justice. It is a story of monsters and mysteries, of ordinary villagers forced to become detectives, of forensic science and media frenzy, of mass outrage and legal twists. Above all, it remains a tragedy – for the children who lost their lives so cruelly and for the parents who will forever wonder what dark secrets died along with them in the shadows of Nithari.