Opinion Who killed the victims at Nithari? 19 years later, Surendra Koli’s indicts criminal justice system

In 2006, the discovery of human remains in a drain behind a bungalow in Noida’s Nithari village exposed a horrific series of crimes — there were at least 16 missing children and young women, and many broken families. The police named two men: Businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, and his domestic help, Surendra Koli, with the latter accused of being the main perpetrator. Both were convicted and sentenced to death by the lower court in one of India’s most sensational cases. Nineteen years later, and two years after the Allahabad High Court acquitted Pandher citing lack of evidence, the Supreme Court’s acquittal of Koli has again upended the narrative. What was once portrayed as conclusive justice for a “rarest of rare” case now stands as an instance of “manifest miscarriage of justice”, aided and abetted by procedural collapse. On Wednesday, Koli walked out of Kasna jail nearly two decades after his arrest. The verdict exposes a criminal justice machinery that mistakes speed and spectacle for due process.

The apex court’s judgment rests on the prosecution’s failure to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt — a collapse built on shoddy investigation amid public frenzy. Koli was in prolonged custody without counsel and there were allegations of torture, inconsistent recovery records, and lack of forensic evidence. The similarities with the 2008 Aarushi Talwar-Hemraj murders point to a dismal pattern — where haste supplants diligence, media glare overshadows method, and police, under pressure and prejudice, chase narratives rather than evidence. In Nithari, for an entire year before the crimes were uncovered, families, mostly from low-income backgrounds, had pleaded for help to trace their missing children, only to be dismissed by an indifferent force.

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Who, then, killed the victims in Nithari? For their families, Koli’s acquittal forces them to confront the fact that the truth may never be known. Unless the police are trained to privilege rigour over bias, evidence over assumption, unless accountability is woven into the system, there will continue to be such capitulations to the performative demands of media trials, eroding trust in the processes of justice.