NEW DELHI: In a major setback to the CBI, the Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed as many as 14 appeals filed by the probe agency last year against the order of the Allahabad High Court acquitting Surendra Koli, the accused in the 2006 Nithari serial killings case in Noida.“There is no perversity in the findings of the Allahabad High Court order acquitting Koli,” said a three-judge bench of the apex court, headed by Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justices Satish Chandra Sharma and K Vinod Chandran.The top court rejected the findings of the CBI, as it found serious lacunae in the probe agency’s investigation. While rejecting the appeal of the CBI, the bench in its order clarified that any recovery made without recording the statement of the accused by the police is not admissible as evidence under the Evidence law. “Only those recoveries that are made from a place accessible to the accused only can be admitted as evidence in a case primarily hinging on circumstantial evidence,” the top court added.Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic help Koli were accused of rape and murder of people, mostly children from their neighbourhood.Earlier, the apex court had issued a notice and sought a response from Koli on the appeals filed by the CBI and the Uttar Pradesh govt.In July 2017, the special CBI court judge Pawan Kumar Tiwari, in his verdict, held Pandher and Koli guilty for killing a 20-year-old woman, Pinki Sarkar, and sentenced them to death for their ‘brutal and diabolical crime.’
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