Anger, grief and unanswered questions as men acquitted over India’s ‘House of Horrors’ killings

One after another, at least 19 children and young women kept disappearing from the small village of Nithari in India’s Uttar Pradesh in 2005. Distraught families filed police complaints and searched the neighbourhoods but their loved ones never returned.

Instead, sometime between 2005 and 2006, dismembered body parts of the missing people started appearing in sewers and drains around the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, horrifying the villagers and soon, the entire country.

After various legal proceedings in 2009, a special Central Bureau of Investigation court sentenced both Pandher and his live-in domestic worker, Surinder Koli, to death for their involvement in the murders.

At the time of their arrest, Koli was charged with murder, abduction, rape, and destruction of evidence while Pandher faced the charge of immoral trafficking.

However, on 16 October, an Indian court freed both men due to a lack of evidence – to the shock and horror of the families of the victims two decades after the serial killings.

“Every day when we sit together for dinner, I still miss keeping aside a plate for my daughter. I imagine she is here with us, but I cannot change the hard reality,” a 60-year-old woman whose 10-year-old daughter was among the victims, told the Indian Express.

The court acquitted the prime accused Koli in 12 cases while Pandher was acquitted in two cases in which he was awarded the death penalty. This is despite body parts stuffed in plastic bags being found buried in Pandher’s backyard and drains in the village in Delhi’s suburbs.

“She was my fifth child … she wanted to become a doctor. That day, I had sent her to a tailor shop just on the other side of Pandher’s house. When she did not come back after two or three hours, I started looking for her. I searched every possible place. On my way back, Pandher and Koli were standing at the gate, talking to each other,” the woman, who was not named by the paper, said.

“When I asked them if they had seen my daughter, they replied rudely hume nahi pata, humne nahi dekha hai [We don’t know, we didn’t see her].”

Pandher’s house was labelled the “House of Horrors” by the local media when details of the rape and murders became public. Police, at the time, also revealed that Koli had allegedly lured, sexually assaulted, and murdered the victims.

Another parent from Nithari who lost his child pelted Pandher’s house with a stone after he saw the news of his acquittal. “I can’t speak currently, the pain is very heavy,” he said.

The Nithari killings had a significant impact on the village as it gained widespread notoriety over these murders. Locals say their village will forever be associated with the horrific crimes.

In 2011, when BBC visited the village, one victim’s father, Pappu Lal, said: “We’re still angry. Whenever I think about my child I feel so sorry, I feel like crying. And whenever I see D5 [Pandher’s house number] I feel like burning it down.”

He said: “Justice hasn’t yet been done and the truth still hasn’t come out.”

Koli allegedly used to lure children to D5 by offering them sweets and chocolate. In 2017, he confessed to strangling the children and women, cannibalism, necrophilia, and dismemberment. During the trial, however, he retracted his confession, claiming he had been tortured by the police into making it.

In 2014, both Pandher and Koli filed mercy petitions after they were sentenced to death but the then-Indian president – the late Pranab Mukherjee – rejected them.

In India, only the convicts in the “rarest of rare” cases are handed the death penalty. This category has over the years come to mean gruesome or revolting cases. Indian law stipulates the president should act on the advice of the federal cabinet, but there is no deadline and a decision can be put off indefinitely.

In 2017, Indian-American filmmaker Ram Devineni argued in his Netflix documentary The Karma Killings on the Nithari murders that Pandher might not be guilty. Mr Devineni told BBC in an interview: “I was reading the stories in the papers and magazines and watching it on TV, thinking this is too unbelievable. Every day new revelations were being reported and each one stranger than the next.”

“With his beard and moustache, he looked like the perfect Bollywood villain. Then there were stories of his drinking, call girls coming to his house, his depression. Mr Pandher was a rich man, he was this privileged person and everyone wanted to bring him down,” he said.

“He [Koli] never denied committing any of the crimes, he always tried to put the blame on someone else. A doctor in their neighbourhood was involved in an organ scam so Koli suggested that he may have been behind the killings,” Mr Devineni said.

The filmmaker suggested that Pandher “had deep love and affection for Koli who covered for him in front of his wife when he saw call girls. Pandher trusted him and left the running of the house to him. I am convinced that Koli committed all the murders on his own. Pandher is innocent.”

Nonetheless, the horrifying killings shed light on the prevalent issues in the country – social inequality, police shortcomings, and the plight of children – especially the poor.

On Monday, after the Allahabad court acquitted the duo, social media users expressed their anger and frustration. One user wrote on Twitter/X: “It is unfathomable how you can rape and murder 20 kids and still get away with it.”

Another user wrote: “#Nitharicase is a reflection of the terrible state of our investigation agencies. After 20 years, poor families have been told that the prosecutors failed to nail any evidence against the accused. Also, how do courts go from death sentence to not guilty?”

“How can this be? I saw the skull and clothes recovered from the drain and gali [street] behind his [Pandher’s] house. I have been living in pain for years and now, it has increased. The way those men murdered my daughter, they must be brought to justice. They destroyed the lives of many families,” a Nithari parent said.

Pandher’s lawyer said he is now expected to walk free, while Koli is set to remain serving a life sentence in another case related to the Nithari killings.

In their ruling on Monday, judges of the Allahabad High Court said that after an evaluation of the available evidence, “the prosecution has failed to prove the guilt of the accused … beyond reasonable doubt.”

The judges heavily criticised the Nithari police investigation, saying it involved “serious lapses” and relied on “inferences of many kinds”.

“The investigation otherwise is botched up and basic norms of collecting evidence have been brazenly violated. It appears to us that the investigation opted for the easy course of implicating a poor servant of the house by demonising him, without taking due care of probing more serious aspects of possible involvement of organised activity of organ trading,” the ruling states.

Police have not identified any other suspects in relation to the killings.