The acquitted in the Nithari case, Surendra Koli died by suicideNOIDA: Surinder Koli was four hours from death on September 7, 2014. The black warrant bore his name and gallows protocol had been activated at Meerut district jail.
It had been five years since a Ghaziabad CBI court pronounced the first of 13 death sentences against the man on trial for the Nithari killings of 2006. Hope of clemency had waned after it was upheld by the high court and Supreme Court and President rejected his mercy petition.
After an intervention by lawyer Indira Jaising and a midnight hearing in Supreme Court, Koli was brought back from the gallows. In the years that followed, the convictions against him were overturned by Allahabad high court.
On November 11, 2025, Supreme Court acquitted Koli, who for nearly two decades was called ‘Butcher of Nithari’, in the last case that had kept him in jail. The next day, he walked out a free man.
That freedom lasted less than a year. Koli was found dead in Haridwar on Friday.
Koli’s time in jail was defined by one overriding purpose: to acquit himself. For a large part of trial proceedings in the CBI court, he argued his own cases.
As a prisoner in Ghaziabad’s Dasna jail, he drowned himself in sheaves of papers where he purportedly wrote out legal arguments that he presented in court. September 2014 was his closest call.
Koli had been transferred quietly from Dasna jail in Ghaziabad, where he had been lodged since his arrest in December 2006, to Meerut. His execution was set for 5am on September 8.
After his mercy plea was rejected, Koli had written to lawyers Yug Mohit Chaudhary, Payoshi Roy and Siddharth Sharma for help after being advised by someone in jail to approach the trio, who were known to take up death-penalty cases. Chaudhary alerted Jaising four hours before the execution.
At 1am, Jaising appeared before Justice H L Dattu, who woke up another judge, Justice Anil Dave. Court staff were summoned from their homes.
50am, Supreme Court stayed Koli’s execution. The intervention came nearly eight years after Koli’s arrest on December 29, 2006.
Lawyers told TOI his journey through the criminal justice system had been compromised right from the beginning. Ravindra S Garai, Supreme Court advocate-on-record who represented Koli in the trial court in 2016 in one of the cases, the murder of Nanda Devi, a 25-year-old house helper, had earlier told TOI, “This case had almost no evidence at all.
