Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh is understood to have recommended rejection of Mercy petitions of five death row convicts including Surendra Koli, who was found guilty in the

sensational Nithari serial rapes and killings. He signed five files giving his recommendations to President Pranab Mukherjee. The other 4 death row convicts are two sisters – Renukabai and Seema and Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik, all from Maharashtra, Jagdish of Madhya Pradesh and Holiram Bordoloi, Assam.

42-year-old Koli, who brutally killed and later axed children in Nithari locality of Noida in UP, was awarded death sentence by a lower court which was upheld by the Allahabad High Court and confirmed by the Supreme Court in February 2011.

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 and killed nine of them. However, the prosecution could prove only five murders. The two sisters were given death sentence.

The case against the mother had to be abated as she died in 1997 while Shinde turned an approver in the case.The Supreme Court had confirmed the death penalty of the two sisters on August 31, 2006.

In January this year, the Supreme Court had ruled that inordinate and inexplicable delays in hanging are grounds for commuting a convict's death penalty and had spared 15 death row convicts from execution.