NEW DELHI: In a major setback to the CBI, the Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed as many as 14 appeals filed by the probe agency last year against the order of the Allahabad High Court acquitting Surendra Koli, the accused in the 2006 Nithari serial killings case in Noida.
“There is no perversity in the findings of the Allahabad High Court order acquitting Koli,” said a three-judge bench of the apex court, headed by Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justices Satish Chandra Sharma and K Vinod Chandran.
The top court rejected the findings of the CBI, as it found serious lacunae in the probe agency’s investigation. While rejecting the appeal of the CBI, the bench in its order clarified that any recovery made without recording the statement of the accused by the police is not admissible as evidence under the Evidence law. “Only those recoveries that are made from a place accessible to the accused only can be admitted as evidence in a case primarily hinging on circumstantial evidence,” the top court added.
Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic help Koli were accused of rape and murder of people, mostly children from their neighbourhood.
Earlier, the apex court had issued a notice and sought a response from Koli on the appeals filed by the CBI and the Uttar Pradesh govt.
In July 2017, the special CBI court judge Pawan Kumar Tiwari, in his verdict, held Pandher and Koli guilty for killing a 20-year-old woman, Pinki Sarkar, and sentenced them to death for their ‘brutal and diabolical crime.’
The Allahabad High Court had later, in January 2015, commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment on account of an inordinate delay in deciding on Koli’s mercy petition. The HC judgement was pronounced by a two-judge bench of the then High Court Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justice P K S Baghel (now retired) on a petition filed by the Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR).
But the Allahabad HC had in October last year, however, acquitted Pandher and Koli in some of the cases concerning the Nithari killings and overturned the death penalty imposed on them by the trial court. The HC had acquitted Koli in 12 cases and Pandher in 2 cases, where they were earlier held guilty for murder and awarded the death penalty by the trial court.
While acquitting Pandher and Koli, the HC had censured the investigating agencies, including UP Police and CBI, for a very casual probe in the case.
No perversity in the findings of HC: Bench
“There is no perversity in the findings of the Allahabad High Court order acquitting Koli,” said a three-judge bench of the apex court, headed by Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justices Satish Chandra Sharma and K Vinod Chandran. The brutal murders had come to public attention in December 2006.