The Union Home Ministry Wednesday rejected the mercy petitions of six death row convicts, including Surendra Koli, who was found guilty in the Nithari serial rapes and killing cases. Home Minister Rajnath Singh signed five files recommending to President Pranab Mukherjee that the mercy pleas of Renukabai and Seema (Maharashtra), Koli (Uttar Pradesh), Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik (Maharashtra), Jagdish (Madhya Pradesh) and Holiram Bordoloi (Assam) should be rejected, official sources said here. Mukherjee’s office had returned the files of Seema and Renukabai and Jagdish to the Home Ministry for review as the previous government sent them to the President’s Secretariat at the fag-end of its tenure. The two sisters, along with their mother and another accomplice Kiran Shinde, kidnapped 13 children between 1990 and 1996 and killed nine of them. However, the prosecution could prove only five murders. The two sisters were given death sentence. The case against the mother had to be abated as she died in 1997 while Shinde turned an approver in the case. Koli, 42, who killed and later axed children in Nithari locality of Noida in UP, was awarded death sentence by a lower court which was upheld by the Allahabad High Court and confirmed by the Supreme Court in February 2011. Koli was found guilty of serial rapes and murders between 2005 and 2006 at his employer and businessman Moninder Singh Pandher’s house in Nithari. Remains of several missing children were found near the house. While 16 cases were filed against Koli, he has been awarded death in four of them so far and others are under trial. The third case pertains to the gruesome killing of a girl child in village Asra of Maharashtra in which the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik in October 2012 for sexually abusing and murdering the victim. The Home Ministry also recommended rejection of mercy petition of Jagadish who was convicted for murdering his wife and five children (four daughters and a son, all aged between one and 16 years). The mercy petition of Assam’s Holiram Bordoloi, whose death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2005, has also been recommended for rejection by the Home Minister. Bordoloi carried out the execution of three men of the same family in a gruesome manner in broad daylight in front of the villagers in an effort to protect his supremacy in the village.
