A WEEK after the nation woke up to skeletons in the Capital’s backyard, investigations seem to have moved on but the crowds outside Noida’s “house of horror” have not dispersed. Fifty metres from the police tape that has sealed Moninder Singh Pandher’s House No D-5, many distressed parents continue to look for answers, pressing against police barricades, protesting and asking questions. And a week later, the excavation has thrown up more questions than investigating officers can answer.

While the neighbourhood has thrashed out every theory, from the possibility of an organ trade racket to a sex angle, the police have waved the confession of Pandher’s cook Surender and claim that at the end of a weeklong hunt for the truth, they have emerged with a “watertight case” against the two men.

Besides the confession, the police are banking on the pornographic material, web cam and laptop they seized from Pandher’s house. The most incriminating piece of evidence, probably, is negatives of Pandher posing in the nude with young girls.

That said, after literally stumbling upon the skeletons, three frantic days of digging and managing hysterical crowds and writing down confessions and the self-congratulatory “we’ve cracked the case”, legally, the Noida police is still looking for clues to nail Pandher.

Missing links

* Besides the organ trade theory, police are looking at Pandher’s visits abroad in October and are exploring the possibility that he was selling pornographic material overseas. No one is fully convinced, though.

* Six policemen have been dismissed but there is no explanation on why the case of the missing children was not investigated for nearly two years. At least 31 children have gone missing from Nithari, adjoining Sector 31, in the past two years. In 2006, the police confirm that eight children went missing, even printing a poster with photographs of 10 children.

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