Most Mysterious Nithari Case's Surendra Koli Found Dead, Months After Acquittal

Death sentence and then acquittal– Nithari Case Surendra Koli, acquitted in all 13 Nithari case trials by November 2025, was found dead at his Haridwar tea stall on Friday. Police suspect suicide; victims’ families allege murder.

North Desk Correspondent

Chandigarh, September 18

Nithari Case Surendra Koli: Surendra Koli, the domestic help at the centre of the 2006 Nithari serial killings case, was found dead at a tea stall he ran in Haridwar on Friday, police said, less than a year after the Supreme Court cleared him of the last of the 13 criminal cases built against him over nearly two decades.

Koli’s body was discovered on Friday morning at a rented tea stall near Lal Mata Temple on Sapt Sarovar Road in Haridwar’s Bhupatwala area. Police said he had been running the stall for only a few days.

Shishupal Singh Negi, Circle Officer, City, Haridwar, said a forensic team had reached the spot and that a medical panel would conduct the post-mortem. “At present, it appears to be a case of suicide,” Negi said, adding that no suicide note had been recovered and that the panchnama and post-mortem proceedings were under way.

Police said they were reviewing CCTV footage from the area and questioning people who had been in contact with Koli in recent months. An Aadhaar card recovered from the spot carried his name and a matching address, helping confirm his identity.

Koli, a resident of Mangrukhal village in Almora, had been living in Haridwar for the past few months, having worked briefly as a security guard in Roshanabad before leasing the space for the tea stall.

Relatives of victims in the Nithari case disputed the suicide theory. They said that if Koli had wanted to end his life, he could have done so during his nearly two decades in custody, and alleged instead that he had been killed. They said they were still awaiting justice. Police have not commented on the allegation and said the investigation was continuing.

Nithari Case & Surendra Koli: How the Nithari case began

Nithari Case & Surendra Koli: The case that would define Koli’s life for twenty years began on December 29, 2006, when local police, searching for a missing person, found human remains in a drain behind bungalow D-5 in Sector 31’s Nithari locality in Noida — a house belonging to businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, where Koli worked as domestic help. Further searches of the drain and surrounding areas eventually recovered skeletal remains, skulls and bones linked to 19 children and young women who had gone missing from the neighbourhood between 2005 and 2006.

The scale and nature of the killings — allegations of sexual assault, murder and mutilation of children from a poor migrant-labour neighbourhood living beside an affluent gated colony — caused nationwide revulsion and raised sharp questions about local policing, which had for months dismissed complaints of missing children. The investigation was transferred to the CBI in 2007 following criticism of the initial police response.

Thirteen separate trials were eventually built on what courts would later describe as a common evidentiary foundation: a confession Koli gave under Section 164 of the CrPC, and recoveries of remains and belongings allegedly made on the basis of his disclosures. A trial court convicted and sentenced Koli to death in 12 of those cases; Pandher was awarded the death penalty in two, over allegations of raping and murdering minors at his house.

Two decades of appeals, then acquittal

Nithari Case & Surendra Koli: In 2011, the Supreme Court upheld Koli’s conviction and death sentence in what became known as the Rimpa Haldar case, and dismissed his review petition in 2014. In January 2015, the Allahabad High Court commuted that death sentence to life imprisonment, citing an inordinate delay in deciding his mercy petition.

The turning point came on October 16, 2023, when the Allahabad High Court acquitted both Koli and Pandher in the 12 companion Nithari cases, holding that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. The court found Koli’s confession involuntary — recorded, it noted, after roughly sixty days of continuous police custody without meaningful legal aid — and held that the recoveries of remains could not be reliably attributed to him alone. Pandher was released on October 20, 2023.

The CBI and the father of one victim challenged the acquittals before the Supreme Court. On July 30, 2025, a Supreme Court bench dismissed those appeals and upheld the 12 acquittals, effectively endorsing the High Court’s finding that the confession and recovery evidence could not be relied upon.

That left only the Rimpa Haldar case — the one conviction the Supreme Court itself had affirmed back in 2011 — still standing against Koli. He filed a curative petition, arguing that two contradictory outcomes could not lawfully stand on the same evidentiary foundation.

On November 11, 2025, a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai, with Justices Surya Kant and Vikram Nath, allowed the petition, set aside the 2011 conviction, and acquitted Koli of all charges — including murder, kidnapping, rape and destruction of evidence — under the Indian Penal Code. The bench ordered his immediate release if not wanted in any other case, bringing an end to every criminal case connected to the Nithari killings, nearly 19 years after his arrest.

Pandher’s family has roots in Lohatbaddi village near Ahmedgarh in Punjab’s Malerkotla belt, though he had lived away from the village for years before the case broke.

What remains unresolved

Nithari Case & Surendra Koli: Koli’s acquittal, as the Supreme Court’s own order noted, rested on the unreliability of the evidence used to convict him — not on a finding that he was innocent of the underlying allegations. That distinction is the unresolved core of the Nithari case: no one has ever been held criminally responsible, under evidence the courts found legally sound, for the deaths of the 19 children and young women whose remains were recovered from Nithari in 2006.

Koli’s death now adds a second unresolved question. Police have said the evidence so far points to suicide; the families of Nithari’s victims have said they believe he was murdered. Both the forensic and criminal investigation into his death are ongoing.

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