All posts tagged: Nithari

Nithari serial killings prime accused walks out of jail

Nithari serial killings prime accused walks out of jail

Published by Webster

Surendra Koli, accused in the infamous Nithari serial killings, has been released from the Luksar district jail in Greater Noida, a day after the Supreme Court acquitted him in the last pending case linked to the 2006 serial murders that had shocked the nation, officials said on Thursday. Jail superintendent Brijesh Kumar confirmed that Koli walked out of the facility around 7.20 pm on Wednesday. “Surendra Koli was released after the order of the Supreme Court,” Kumar said. The Nithari case came to light in when skeletal remains, skulls and bones were discovered from the backyard and drains near a bungalow (D-5) belonging to businessman Moninder Singh Pandher in Sector 31, Noida. The gruesome findings, unearthing the disappearance and killings of several children and women, had triggered nationwide outrage and terrorised the local community. Pandher, a co-accused in the case, was also in jail for years but was released on October 20, 2023 following his acquittal in the case. On Tuesday, a SC bench headed by comprising Chief Justice BR Gavai and Justice Surya Kant …

Nithari killings: Surendra Koli walks out of jail, lawyer says flawed system ‘almost executed’ him twice

Nithari killings: Surendra Koli walks out of jail, lawyer says flawed system ‘almost executed’ him twice

Published by Parlour News

Surendra Koli, accused in the 2006 Nithari serial killings, walked out of Gautam Budhh Nagar’s Luksar Jail after the Supreme Court acquitted him in last of the 13 cases pertailing to the crime, allowing his curative petition challenging his conviction. Surendra Koli walked out of the Luksar Jail in Greater Noida on Wednesday after the Supreme Court of India acquitted him in last case in Noida, India, on Wednesday, November 12, 2025. (Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times) Surendra Koli’s lawyer, Payoshi Roy, said the verdict highlighted serious flaws in India’s criminal justice system. “This case exposes the deep fissures in our criminal justice. It reveals how easy it is to fabricate evidence and falsely implicate a poor man and numb judicial scrutiny by making sensational claims of cannibalism. Koli was almost executed twice,” said Koli’s lawyer. “Had he been executed we would have never learnt the truth of his innocence. This judgment should make us rethink the death penalty in India and how marginalized and impoverished people are treated within the criminal justice system,” Roy added. What …

Nithari killings case: Supreme Court acquits Surendra Koli, orders his release

Nithari killings case: Supreme Court acquits Surendra Koli, orders his release

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday acquitted Surendra Koli, the only remaining convict in the 2006 Nithari mass killings, and ordered his immediate release if not wanted in any other case, news agency PTI reported. The verdict marks Koli’s acquittal in the 13th and final case linked to the gruesome killings, after being cleared in 12 others. The Nithari killings, which shocked the nation, came to light on December 29, 2006, when the skeletal remains of several children were found in a drain behind businessman Moninder Singh Pandher’s house in Noida’s Nithari village. Koli, who worked as Pandher’s domestic help, was accused of raping and murdering multiple children. A bench of Chief Justice BR Gavai and Justices Surya Kant and Vikram Nath, while allowing Koli’s curative petition in the case involving the alleged rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, said criminal conviction cannot rest on conjecture or suspicion, reported PTI. “Suspicion, however grave, cannot replace proof beyond reasonable doubt. The presumption of innocence endures until guilt is proved through admissible and reliable evidence,” the court …

Supreme Court to hear appeals against acquittal in Nithari killings in March | Latest News India

Supreme Court to hear appeals against acquittal in Nithari killings in March | Latest News India

Published by Parlour News

The Supreme Court will hear the appeals challenging the acquittal of Surendra Koli in the Nithari killings on March 25. Surendra Koli. (Sakib Ali/HT File Photo) The order was passed by a bench headed by justice Bhushan R Gavai while hearing a set of appeals filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Uttar Pradesh government challenging Koli’s acquittal. The bench, also comprising justice Augustine George Masih, directed the top court’s registry to provide the digitised trial court records on the scheduled date of hearing as Koli’s lawyers sought to rely on the same to highlight procedural delays in the investigation of the case. The appeals were directed against the October 2023 Allahabad high court order passed in separate cases related to the killings at Nithari village near Noida, where a dozen minor girls were murdered between 2005 and 2007. The court had issued notices on nearly a dozen appeals filed by CBI and state government in July last year. The HC order had reversed the judgment of the trial court convicting Koli …

As ‘Sector 36’ streams on Netflix, here is the true story of the Nithari killings

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Netflix film Sector 36, directed by Aditya Nimbalkar and starring Vikrant Massey and Deepak Dobriyal, has opened to lukewarm reviews and plentiful criticism for its portrayal of the infamous 2005-06 Nithari serial killings. Here is what actually happened. Mysterious disappearances, unheard complaints It was sometime in 2003 that residents of Nithari, an urban village in the middle of Noida, began reporting an unnaturally high number of disappearances of women and children in the area. In many cases, the Noida police simply refused to file complaints. And even in cases where they did, investigators did not make any headway into the matter. In May 2006, a distraught father went to the police about his missing daughter, claiming that she had visited the home of a certain Moninder Singh Pandher in the nearby Sector-31, Noida on the day of her disappearance. No FIR was lodged until June, when the father made a scene at the official residence of a senior police officer. Upon tracing the missing woman’s phone, the police were led to Surinder Koli, who worked …

Sector 36: Does Vikrant Massey’s exploitative Netflix movie really expect us to nod in agreement with a serial killer? | Bollywood News

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When people complain about the Indian streaming industry relying too heavily on violence and gore, they’re probably talking about stuff like Sector 36 — the new crime-thriller on Netflix that reduces a real-life horror story to a cat-and-mouse chase between two thinly written characters on either side of the law. The reluctant cop is played by Deepak Dobriyal, while Vikrant Massey gets top-billing the serial killer trying to evade his capture. They’re put on collision course by a movie that routinely favours contrivance over cleverness, virtue-signalling over sensitivity. In the film’s centrepiece interrogation scene, modelled perhaps on the one featuring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat, Massey’s character makes repeated references to necrophilia, child abuse, and cannibalism. But this isn’t the problem. Sector 36 is, after all, a movie about the infamous Nithari case from a couple of decades ago. But it becomes a problem precisely because the movie has no idea how to approach the story with nuance. It chooses, instead, to take the tone of a late night television newscast, drawing large …

Sector 36 Review: Vikrant Massey Is Impeccable in This Crime Drama Based on Nithari Killings

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For every actor, there is a role that unlocks their untapped talent and pivots their career. Vikrant Massey’s latest outing in Netflix’s Sector 36 as a psychopathic killer might just be it. While Massey has done his fair share of negative roles in the past, his on-screen persona this time is enough to send a shiver down your spine. In this Netflix original that tells a fictionalised story based on true events from 2006 Noida serial murders, the actor plays Prem Singh, a predator behind the mysterious disappearance of several kids from a slum in the titular Sector 36. With an unnerving sense of pride and fascination, he preys on his victims, dismembers them craftily, engages in necrophilia, and sometimes even feasts on their remains – without a flinch. If anything, these carnal acts bring him catharsis, nudging the psychopath into a celebratory trance. In a scene we see him lying on the sofa basking in the satisfaction of successfully butchering a woman after she failed to reciprocate his romantic feelings. Deepak Dobiryal plays a …