Surendra Koli found dead in a Haridwar tea stall ten months after acquittal

Surendra Koli, acquitted last November in the last remaining case from the 2006 Nithari killings, was found dead on Friday morning inside a rented tea stall on Sapt Sarovar Road in Haridwar, opposite Lal Mata Temple in the Bhupatwala area.

Circle Officer Shishupal Singh Negi said passers-by alerted police around midday. A forensic team attended. No suicide note was found in his clothes or in the kiosk. The body was sent for post-mortem. Family members in Mangrukhal, Almora, were informed and were travelling to the city. City Kotwal Kundan Singh Rana and Sub-Inspector Vikram Bisht at Kotwali confirmed the identification. Koli was 50.

Negi said the facts available on Friday afternoon pointed to suicide. That is a police working view, not a closed finding. The autopsy and a full scene report have not been published.

The case he walked out of

Koli was a domestic worker at D-5, Sector 31, Noida, the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher. In December 2006, skeletal remains of children and women were recovered from a drain behind that house. Thirteen cases followed. Koli, then about 30, received multiple death sentences. Pandher also spent years in prison.

The Allahabad High Court acquitted Koli in 12 of those cases in October 2023 and released Pandher the same month. One conviction remained, in the killing of Rimpa Halder, with a life term. On 11 November 2025 a Supreme Court bench headed by then Chief Justice B.R. Gavai allowed Koli’s curative petition, set aside that last conviction and ordered his release from Luksar Jail in Greater Noida. The court noted the pattern of acquittals in the other 12 files.

He had been out for about ten months. Reports in Haridwar said he had been living quietly in the pilgrimage town and had taken the stall only recently. One police account put the tenancy at around ten days.

The dispute attached to the stall

Narayan Singh Rawat, an Almora activist who had helped the family through the litigation, told the Times of India he had given Koli Rs 25,000 to take the kiosk from a local farmer leader. Rawat said Koli had called him repeatedly to say the leader was demanding another Rs 5,000 and harassing him. Rawat said he suspected murder and was going to Haridwar to put that account on the police record.

That is an allegation from a family ally, not a finding. It is now part of what investigators have to check: tenancy papers, payments, incoming calls, and whether anyone else was in the stall.

What the death does not reopen

The Supreme Court judgment still stands. Koli’s death does not revive the 13 criminal files. It does put a public full stop on a man who spent two decades as the face of a case that first defined him as a killer and then, in stages, as someone the courts would not keep convicted.

Nithari remains a wound in Noida. Parents who never received a complete account of what happened behind D-5 will read Friday’s news as another closed door. People who followed the acquittals will read it as the last chapter of a prosecution that the higher courts dismantled. Police in Haridwar have a narrower job. They have a body, a stall, no note, and a man from Almora who says the rope is not the whole story. The post-mortem and the tenancy trail are the next documents that matter.