DEATH FOR PANDHER, KOLI IN NITHARI CASE

DEATH FOR PANDHER, KOLI IN NITHARI CASE 13 Feb 2009, 1454 hrs IST, TNN Text: GHAZIABAD: The Special CBI court pronounced death sentence to Nithari killings' convicts Surender Koli and Moninder Singh Pandher on Friday afternoon, calling the gruesome episode ‘rarest of the rare’ case. The CBI counsel had earlier asked for death penalty for Surender Koli but refused to ask for a similar punishment for Pandher. At least one chapter of the Nithari serial rapes and killings, which had shaken the country's conscience and disgraced the Noida police, has ended on a positive note. More than two years after the body parts of 19 children and young women, who had been sexually abused and mutilated, were found in a drain behind D-5 house in Noida's Sector 31, the owner, Moninder Singh Pandher, was on Thursday evening convicted for kidnapping, raping and murdering 15-year-old Rimpa Haldar, besides chopping up and hiding her body in the drain. His servant, Surender Koli was convicted on the same counts but for attempted rape instead of rape. During interrogation earlier, it had been reported that he was suffering from necrophilia which makes a person sexually attracted to corpses. The two were also convicted for having criminally conspired to rape and murder Rimpa and hide her body to conceal evidence of the crime. Special judge Rama Jain delivered the guilty verdict on Thursday and when the judge was reading out her order, Pandher and Koli — an odd couple with Pandher from an affluent and elite background whom no one ever suspected of having a darker side — were standing next to each other. Looking anxious and tense, they didn't speak. Pandher was, however, heard telling his son, who was biting his nails, that "Everything is destined, son." Pandher's son, Karan, and his wife rushed out of the court immediately after the verdict and disappeared. This is the first verdict in Nithari's horror story —the CBI has so far filed chargesheets in 16 cases while three more are awaited. Significantly, the CBI had cleared Pandher of all charges that the Noida police had earlier booked him for except for buying sex and trying to protect Koli. It was on the court's order that Pandher was booked for rape and murder and eventually convicted. "This case," said a beaming Anil Haldar, father of the victim, "has taken so many twists and turns since the chargesheet was filed on May 7, 2007, that we thought things will not work out. I did not trust the CBI. So I got my own lawyer, Khalid Khan." Rimpa Haldar had gone missing on June 15, 2005. Anil Haldar had reported this to Noida's Sector 20 police station but the cops registered a kidnapping case only on July 7. They were quite used to telling Nithari villagers complaining about their missing children, mostly girls, that they must have eloped. After the Nithari killings were unearthed on December 29, 2006, with the discovery of the gunny bags in the drain which contained the gory, tell-tale evidence — the skulls stuffed in 57 gunny bags contained almost 700 pieces of bones — things started moving. But with the Nithari victims' families not having any faith in the city police, the case was transferred to the CBI. It took charge of the case on January 11, 2007. Finally, the trial in the case of Rimpa began on July 4, 2007. On February 2 last year, counsel for Anil Haldar Khalid Khan produced documents in which Pandher had been accused of paying bribes to police officers to hush up the case against him. Area police post chief Simranjit Kaur had even been arrested for accepting bribes from Pandher; she remains in jail. Also, Anil Haldar deposed in court to say that Pandher had led to the recovery of a saw used in the murders, in his presence. So, on February 27 last year the court ordered that Pandher, too, should be booked for the rape and murders of six girls, including Rimpa. On January 23 this year, the court summoned former Noida deputy superintendent of police Dinesh Yadav after Haldar told the court about some documents allegedly fabricated in the case to get Pandher off the hook. Then, on January 27, sub-inspector RR Dixit, who had signed the recovery memo of the skulls and a saw, told Jain that both Pandher and Koli had led to the recoveries. When it was denied that any such entry had been made in the case diary, Khalid Khan produced a copy of the application the Noida police made before a Noida judge, on December 30, 2005 to seek the remand of "both Pandher and Koli" to recover the weapons and any more body parts. After this, things had become rather difficult for the CBI. The judge ordered the statements of RR Dixit and Dinesh Yadav to be recorded on January 30. On Thursday the guilty verdict was finally delivered and the death sentence was pronounced today.

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