Who killed 19 girls in Nithari? With SC rejecting appeals, there are no answers — and no closure

This was where businessman Moninder Singh Pandher used to live with his domestic help, Surinder Koli.

In 2006, a drain behind the house in Noida’s Sector 31 revealed a horrific sight — human skulls, skeletal remains, and fragments of clothes of 19 missing girls were found stuffed in gunny bags.

Pandher and Koli, accused of raping, killing, and dismembering their victims, were arrested, sentenced to death — and eventually acquitted.

Jhabbu Lal, whose daughter Jyoti was among the victims, says the shuttered house festers like an open wound.

Neither he nor his wife can read, but they had heard about the apex court verdict after he received calls from the media for a response. “What’s the use of all these verdicts if nothing changes? We went from Ghaziabad to Allahabad to Delhi’s courts. And now? He walks free.”

In its 2023 order acquitting Pandher and Koli, the Allahabad High Court had come down heavily on both the Uttar Pradesh Police and the CBI’s investigation. The HC had pointed to unsatisfactory “evidence”, procedural loopholes, and “improbable possibilities” in its judgment.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dismissed 14 appeals by the CBI and families of victims challenging their acquittal. Koli, meanwhile, will continue to be in prison even after his acquittal was upheld by the SC in 12 cases because of the life term awarded to him in the murder of a teenage girl by the HC.

Sitting outside the rented shanty he and his wife now occupy in a gated part of the village, Lal says 10-year-old Jyoti used to help them iron clothes just across from D5.

He now recalls how they’d exchange pleasantries with “Pander Sahab” as he passed by, and sometimes found blood-stained clothes in the pile that his househelp, Koli, would hand them for ironing.

“Once, he said it was from buying chicken. We even asked Koli… he said, ‘Sahab ko murga katwaate waqt khoon ki cheeth lag gayi hogi. (Sir must have got his clothes stained while slaughtering a chicken.”

Jyoti never came home one evening. Her remains were later recovered from D5’s backyard.

“If he wasn’t guilty, why did the police keep him? Why was he in jail all these years? Why were those files reopened and closed over and over again? Why were we running to courts for 18 years?” Lal’s voice rises and then breaks.

“My life has been spent doing this. Now, where do I go?”
In the village, the address is spoken of in lowered voices. A kilometre away, in A block, when one asks for directions to the house, there is instant recognition.

“Arre! D5 jaana hai? (You want to go to D5?)” says a man, before describing an elaborate route.

Those who lived here when the case broke still carry memories in fragments. “At that time, there was nothing here, no market, barely any houses. Only that bungalow stood tall,” said Bhram Singh, a former resident who now lives in Bulandshahr but was visiting his ancestral home nearby.

“When children started disappearing, no one suspected anything. But when the news broke, it felt like the earth slipped from under our feet.”

A new market is now around D5, small businesses, apartments and kothis creeping up on either side. But the house, or what remains of it, is shunned. “People say that if you pass by that house late at night, you can hear the sound of girls screaming,” Bhram adds.

Shyam Singh, who moved into a house directly facing D5 in 2015, says he heard of the case. “I was in Varanasi when it happened. The whole country was shaken. But what’s to remember? Good deeds should be remembered, not the crimes of monsters.”

Lal’s family has shifted from the area. Their new home, a tin-roofed structure tucked behind high walls of now a more developed sector, is just close enough to D5 for the memories to remain inescapable, but far enough that no one pays attention anymore.

“There used to be protests. Candle marches. Journalists everywhere. Where are they now?” Lal asks. “We had nothing, and still we fought. And now we’re told there’s no evidence.”

Nineteen years later, the crumbling walls of the D5 bungalow are a haunting reminder for the families of the young children murdered inside its walls.

But who killed them?

To this day, there is no closure.