TIL Desk/National/Ghaziabad/ Noida businessman Moninder Singh Pandher and his servant Surinder Koli were sentenced to death by a special CBI court here today in the Nithari serial killings case for murdering 20-year-old domestic help Pinki Sarkar in 2006. Special judge Pawan Kumar Tiwari, who had convicted the duo on Saturday, handed down the sentence after which Pandher, who was out on bail, was taken into judicial custody.
Special senior public prosecutor Jai Prakash Sharma said the court termed it as a rarest of the rare cases after being satisfied that there was no scope left for their reform or rehabilitation. The judge found both of them guilty of kidnapping, raping, murder and having hatched a criminal conspiracy.
The case related to the disappearance of Sarkar on October 5, 2006 when she was returning home from work along the road outside the D-5 residence of Pandher in NOIDA. The CBI had said that Koli allegedly abducted her, raped her and later killed her. After the murder, he beheaded the victim and threw her head and garments in a drain behind Pandher’s house, it had said.
The CBI had filed the case after the victim’s parents identified her clothes in April 2007 and later some of the skeletal remains were identified by matching the DNA samples with her parents. This is the second time that Pandher has been awarded death sentence. He, along with Koli, was given capital punishment by the special court on February 13, 2009 for the murder of 14-year-old girl Rimpa Halder at his house.
