Thaindian News

Ghaziabad, May 3 (IANS) A special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court is likely to pronounce Tuesday its verdict in the rape and murder of seven-year-old Arti, the second case in the serial killings in Uttar Pradesh’s Nithari village.

Judge A.K. Singh fixed May 4 for judgment on April 30.

Nineteen children and women in Noida’s Nithari village were allegedly murdered in the serial killings.

Investigators filed as many as 19 first information reports (FIRs) in Nithari murder cases. But the CBI, which took over the probe from police, filed charge sheets in 14 cases in court.

In the charge sheet, the CBI has made businessman Moninder Singh Pandher’s domestc servant Surender Koli the sole accused for brutally murdering the Arti.

The CBI said Arti, a kinder garten student of Sarva Hitkari Sikshha Niketan, on Sep 25, 2006, left her house to get a chocolate from her grandfather’s house nearby.

When she did not return, her father Durga Prasad lodged a complaint with Noida police. Police filed the charge sheet in the case on Dec 29, 2006.

The CBI, which later took over the investigations, stuck to the Noida police theory on the murder.

Of the 14 Nithari murder cases, the judgment in the first case of Rimpa Haldhar was pronounced about a year ago, in which the main accused Surender Koli and his employer Moninder Singh Pandher were sentenced to death by a lower court in Ghaziabad.

The Allahabad High Court upheld the lower court’s punishment given to Koli case but gave clean chit to Pandher, who was said to be away in Australia when Rimpa’s killing took place on his house.