Multiple leads in Noida case

Cops visit maid’s home  in Malda

NOIDA: Police visited a village in the Malda district of West Bengal to inquire about Maya Sarkar, the domestic help of Moninder Singh Pandher, the main accused in the Noida killings.

Maya, who has been arrested in Noida, hailed from Nalagola Purbapara village in Malda. Anil Roy, the officer-in charge of Bamungola police station, said the police would also inquire into a number of other children who went missing from the area in the last two years.

Maya had been working in Noida with her husband Nitya Sarkar. The couple had left to make a fortune, Roy said. Maya was the second wife of Nitya, he added. His first wife too lived and worked in Noida, police said.    

According to villagers, the family, once poor like them, used to visit the village once in a while. Recently, they had adopted a flashy lifestyle. This had raised many eyebrows.

Distraught parents
Distraught parents of children gone missing in the past few years in north India are heading towards Nithari village in Noida, in the hope of finding atleast the
skeletal remains of their children.

Photographs of their missing kids were slung around their necks. In all 132 under-16 children were reported missing in Kanpur district in the past five years, as per statistics.

“If there are 132 missing children in the last five years, it is a matter of serious concern and investigation,” District Magistrate Anurag Srivastava said. Police in Ambala are meanwhile preparing a list of children reported missing over the past few months and collected photographs of some of them.

Angry residents
Nithari residents vent their ire once again on Friday as they took to the streets and pelted stones on Pandher’s residence.

More than 100 people marched to Pandher’s D-5, Sector-31 house, and demanded capital punishment for the accused. The protestors shouted slogans against the police and the government for the shoddy work in the case.

They first hanged effigies of the two accused — Pandher and his servant Surendra Koli — and then burnt them. Some of the protesters even tried to cross over the barricades put around Pandher's house.

A large contingent of police, deployed in the area, was able to keep the situation under control. The protest march was organised by a local outfit ‘Pravasi Mahasangh’, police said.

CPI(ML) activists also held a protest demonstration in Nithari, demanding a CBI probe into the incident.

Narco tests are on in Gandhinagar

Jumana Shah

AHMEDABAD: The police on Friday put Moninder Singh Pandher and his servant, Surinder Koli, through a series of narco-analysis, brain-mapping and polygraph tests, at a Forensic Science Laboratory in Gujarat.

The duo is scheduled to go through several forensic tests over a period of three to four days. “Both the accused have to undergo three different tests. We’ll conduct narco-analysis, brain finger printing and polygraph tests on them. The tests might take three to four days,” FSL director, JM Vyas, said.

Though the tests are not admissible as evidence in court, it will help them understand the criminals better, police said. “We will also examine their behaviour and response to various questions put before them,” said Vyas.

The duo has been remanded in the police custody till January 10. “We hope the tests will get over before the time of remand and can produce the two before court,” said deputy superintendent of police, Dinesh Yadav, in charge of the police team.

Forensic evidence
A team of forensic experts from Agra inspected the bungalow of Moninder Singh, the prime accused in the serial murder case in Noida, on Friday.

They have gathered clues in connection with the rape and murder of several children, sources said. Meanwhile, another FIR has been registered regarding a missing child’s case on Friday, police said.

According to parents of six-year-old Soni, their daughter was missing since September 24, 2004, from Morena village in Sector 24 here.

The girl’s father, Vijender Singh, a migrant from Bulandshahr, identified some undergarments recovered from Pandher’s house and kept at the Sector 20 police station.  So far, 17 FIRs have been registered in connection with missing children since the killings came to light last Friday.

Ministers continued to visit Nithari, as Rama Pilot, wife of late Congress leader Rajesh Pilot and mother of Dausa MP, Sachina Pilot, visited the area on Friday. She demanded a CBI probe into the case and said that she has no faith in the police investigation. “We will take to the streets if a CBI probe is not ordered into the incident,” Pilot said.

She complained that FIRs are still not being registered by the police despite parents identifying their own children among the dead.

Pilot also criticised Mulayam Singh Yadav for not visiting Nithari and criticized his brother Shivpal Singh Yadav for describing the incident as routine.