NEW DELHI, Jan 25: A suspected serial killer was beaten unconscious by an angry mob outside a court on Thursday after being remanded in custody over the gruesome slaying of 21 people, mostly children.

Businessman Moninder Singh Pandher was knocked out and his co-suspect, domestic help Surender Kohli, was also roughed up as they were led from the court near the Indian capital in a dramatic confrontation shown live on television.

“Some lawyers and some members of the public who were present at the court premises beat up both the men,” said a Central Bureau of Investigation official, who did not wish to be named.

“I have been told Pandher was beaten up rather badly. I am not aware of Kohli's condition. We had adequate police protection for the two men but the public turned up in huge numbers,” the CBI official said.

The accused businessman was taken to hospital, news reports said.

The lawyers involved in the attack were believed to have been at the court on matters unrelated to the case which has shocked India.

The pair have been in police custody since their arrest on Dec 29 over the kidnap, rape and murder of at least 21 people in a New Delhi suburb.

The attack on the pair occurred as a group of lawyers and scores of onlookers gathered outside the court in suburban Ghaziabad where Pandher and Kohli were produced for an extension of their time in police custody.

Television footage showed scores of lawyers and members of the public scrambling over motorcycles and two-wheeled scooters parked outside the courtrooms to get at the two men.

Public feelings have been running high ever since police began discovering human remains from drains around the “House of Horrors” in the wealthy New Delhi suburb of Noida where the two men lived.

The CBI has said it has collected around “50 bags filled with biomaterials”, or body parts, from the drains around the home of the two suspects that is now shuttered.

The servant told the CBI during interrogation he kidnapped children and women and took them to his employer's bungalow, raped and killed them and often had sex with corpses as young as three years old, police said.

The servant also tried to eat human parts in the belief it could cure him of impotency, police said.

Local people complained that police long ignored complaints of children missing in the district.

After their complaints, six policemen in Noida were dismissed, three suspended for neglect of duty and the investigation was transferred to the federal CBI.—AFP