Pandher, Koli guilty of murder, rape

NEW DELHI: A CBI judge on Thursday found the two main accused in the Nithari murders, businessman Moninder Singh Pandher and his servant Surinder Koli, guilty of raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl, one of the 19 victims whose body parts were unearthed from drains around Pandher���s home.

���I have found both Moninder Singh Pandher and Surinder Koli guilty,��� pronounced Special CBI judge Rama Jain, leading to a round of applause by those present in the courtroom. The conviction of Pandher may come as an embarrassment to CBI as it had given him a clean chit in the chargesheet filed in May 2007 based on his alibi that he was unaware of the serial killings going on in his house. The chargesheet blamed the killings entirely on Koli.

Pandher and Koli were arrested in December, 2006, after the body parts of 19 children and young women were found packed in 57 plastic bags and buried in the backyard and drains around Pandher���s D-5 home in Sector 31, Noida.
The case shocked the entire nation and his house was dubbed the ���house of horrors��� by the media.

Pandher had told the CBI that he had mobile phone records showing he was usually out on business when the killings happened.

This had subsequently led the CBI to give him a clean chit. But a special CBI court then extended Pandher���s charges to include rape and murder of one of the victims after he helped them find some human body parts.

Pandher, 55, and Koli, 38, have been in judicial custody since January 2007. Found guilty of murder, rape, criminal conspiracy and destruction of evidence, the two will know the quantum of their sentence on Friday.

Capital punishment cannot be ruled out. Rimpa was first of the victims who was brutally killed on February 8, 2005, and her body was found hacked. Koli was suffering from necrophilia and also charged with cannibalism.