NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to convict Surendra Koli, after hearing an appeal filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) challenging the Allahabad High Court’s order of his acquittal in the 2005-06 horrific Nithari killings in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.A two-judge bench of the apex court, headed by Justice BR Gavai and Justice KV Viswanathan issued notice to convict, Koli and others and tagged the appeal of the CBI along with other pending pleas before it.In July 2017, the special CBI court judge Pawan Kumar Tiwari held Moninder Singh Pandher and Koli guilty for killing of a 20-year-old woman, Pinki Sarkar, and sentenced them to death for their brutal and diabolical crime.The Allahabad HC 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 verdict was pronounced by a two-judge bench of then High Court Chief Justice (now Chief Justice of India) D Y Chandrachud and Justice P K S Baghel (Now retired) on a petition filed by the Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights.But, the Allahabad High Court had in October last year, however, acquitted Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic help Surendra 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 in these cases.While acquitting Pandher and Koli, the HC had censured the investigating agencies including the UP Police and CBI for a very casual probe in the case.During the hearing on Monday, the Solicitor General (SG) Tushar Mehta, senior law officer representing the CBI, said that Koli was a serial killer who used to lure young girls and kill them. “The killings were gruesome,” he said and told the bench that there were accusations of cannibalism and the trial court had awarded death penalty to Koli, but the same had been reversed by the Allahabad High Court last year.
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