Surendra Koli found dead at a Haridwar tea stall ten months after his Nithari acquittal

Surendra Koli, acquitted in 2025 in the last of the Nithari killing cases, was found dead on 18 September at a rented tea stall on Sapt Sarovar Road in Haridwar, opposite Lal Mata Temple. Police said he was hanging from a rope inside the stall. No suicide note was recovered. Circle Officer Shishupal Singh Negi told PTI the first reading was suicide. Garhwal Range IG Rajeev Swaroop said an inquest had been opened. The body was sent for post-mortem.

Koli, 50, was from Mangrukhal in Almora. After the Supreme Court allowed his curative petition on 11 November 2025, he left prison and moved to Haridwar, where he ran the stall. Sub-Inspector Vikram Bisht of Haridwar Kotwali said the Saptarishi outpost received the call in the morning. City Kotwal Kundan Singh Rana said the family in Almora had been informed.

The cases that defined him

The Nithari killings came to light in December 2006, when skeletal remains of children and women were found in a drain behind the Noida house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher. Koli worked there as a domestic helper. He was convicted and sentenced to death in several of the 13 cases. The Allahabad High Court acquitted him in 12 cases in October 2023. Pandher was also acquitted and released that month. On 11 November 2025 a Supreme Court bench headed by then Chief Justice B.R. Gavai set aside the last conviction and ordered Koli’s release.

For 19 years the public story was that Koli was the man in the Nithari house. For the last ten months the legal story has been that the convictions did not hold. Those two stories never met in a way that gave him a quiet life. A victim’s father told reporters the death should be treated as murder. That claim is not evidence. It is a measure of how little trust remains around a case that passed through police, trial courts, a high court, the Supreme Court and now a tea stall in a pilgrimage town.

What the inquest has to answer

Uttarakhand police have a body, a rope, a stall and no note. The post-mortem and the forensic visit will decide whether the first description stands. If it does, the file closes as a suicide by a man who spent most of his adult life in custody for crimes the courts later said were not proved against him. If it does not, Haridwar becomes the latest chapter of a case that has already been rewritten once.

There is no public record yet of a note, a visitor, or a threat. There is a rented stall, a morning discovery, and a family in Almora. The useful next facts are the autopsy findings and whether the inquest records anyone who saw Koli in the hours before the call to Saptarishi. Until those are out, the only solid sentence is the one police already have: a man acquitted in all 13 Nithari cases is dead in Haridwar, and the state has to explain how.