New Delhi: Surendra Koli, a prime accused in the sensational 2006 Nithari killings case who was acquitted in 2025, was found dead in Haridwar Friday morning.
According to the police, after he walked out of jail a free man last November, Koli moved to Haridwar, where he ran a rented tea stall.
On Friday morning, he was found dead, hanging from a rope inside the tea stall. No suicide note has been recovered so far.
“The body has been sent for post-mortem and a probe has been initiated,” said a senior police officer, not wanting to be named.
Garhwal Range IG Rajeev Swaroop told ThePrint, “He died by suicide this morning and an inquest proceeding has been initiated.”
The Nithari killings came to light in December 2006, when skeletal remains of children were discovered from a drain behind the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher in Noida’s Nithari village. Koli, Pandher’s domestic help, was accused of kidnapping, raping and killing several children between 2005 and 2007, leading to 13 separate prosecutions.
He was convicted in one of these cases in 2011 and sentenced to death, a punishment later commuted to life imprisonment by the Allahabad High Court in 2015. However, there was an appeal pending in the Supreme Court that challenged his life imprisonment commutation. In the remaining 12 cases, the Allahabad High Court acquitted both Koli and Pandher.
In November last year, the Supreme Court acquitted Koli in the final pending rape and murder case against him, effectively closing one of India’s most disturbing yet dramatic criminal sagas.
Koli’s conviction in this case, involving the 2005 killing of a 15-year-old girl, had earlier been upheld by the top court in February 2011. However, he approached the Supreme Court again through a curative petition this year. He based his curative plea on a 2023 Supreme Court decision that upheld his acquittal by the Allahabad High Court in 12 of the 13 Nithari cases.
This was the 13th case, in which he was sentenced to death by all three courts—the trial court, Allahabad HC and the top court.
While acquitting Koli in 12 cases and Pandher in two, the Allahabad HC had in 2023 repeatedly noted that investigators failed to probe the organ trade angle in the case.
The high court also mentioned that this aspect wasn’t probed to a conclusion despite investigators knowing that one of Pandher’s neighbours was a doctor who had been a suspect in an earlier separate case involving allegations of organ trade.
Giridharan Velamore is a TPSJ alum, currently interning with ThePrint.
(Edited by Ananya Deshpande)