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The government on Thursday recommended the rejection of five mercy petitions including that of Surendra Koli sent to the gallows for the infamous serial killing of children in Nithari in Noida and of two sisters sentenced to death for murdering several children.
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh signed five files recommending to President Pranab Mukherjee that the mercy petitions of Renukabai and Seema (Maharashtra), Koli (Uttar Pradesh), Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik (Mahasrashtra), Jagdish (Madhya Pradesh) and Holiram Bordoloi (Assam) should be rejected, official sources said.
The death sentence of 42-year-old Surendra Koli, who brutally killed and later axed children in Nithari locality of Noida in UP, was confirmed by the Supreme Court in February 2011.
While 16 cases were filed against him, he has been awarded death sentence in four cases so far and others are still under trial. Out of the five whose mercy petitions were rejected by the government, Mukherjee's office had returned the files of Seema and Renukabai and Jagdish to the home ministry for review as the previous government sent them to the President's Secretariat at the fag end of its tenure.
The two sisters, along with their mother and another accomplice Kiran Shinde, kidnapped 13 children between 1990 to 1996 out of whom they killed nine. However, the prosecution could prove only five murders and sentenced the two sisters to death. The case against the mother had to be abated as she died in 1997 while Shinde turned an approver in the case.
They used to kidnap children from localities of poor people in the areas of their operation and force them to commit thefts, lift goods and snatch chains. But when the children grew older enough to understand things, they were murdered by smashing their heads against the wall, railway tracks, by hitting them with iron rods or strangulation.
The Supreme Court had confirmed the death penalty of the two sisters on August 31, 2006.