Nearly 3 years after Sunanda's death, Delhi Police asks ED to probe IPL angle
NEW DELHI: After two and half years, Delhi Police on Tuesday finally realized that it would not be able to probe the financial irregularities related to the defunct Indian Premier League team Kochi Tuskers, in connection with the mysterious death of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar.
Sources said that Joint Commissioner of Delhi R P Upadhyaya, who is heading the Pushkar murder case, has written a letter to Enforcement Directorate’s head Karnal Singh to investigate the financial aspect which might be spread across several countries. So far, the Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) was probing the financial aspect.
The IPL controversy broke in 2010 with allegations that Tharoor misused his office to ensure that `70 crore, equivalent to 19 per cent equity in the IPL franchise, was paid to Sunanda. However, after ex-IPL boss Lalit Modi tweeted the ownership pattern in 2010, Sunanda gave up the equity.
The EOW was probing whether Sunanda was used as a proxy by Tharoor or someone else in the the Kochi Tuskers management. It was also investigating whether the murky ownership pattern of the team had something to do with her murder.
To probe the IPL angle into the murder, the police had examined TV journalists whom Sunanda allegedly contacted before her death in January 2014. Sources said that she had contacted Barkha Dutt, Rahul Kanwal, Prema Sri Devi, Sagarika Ghosh and Nalini Singh, and had also planned to hold a press conference on the issue.
In most of the phone calls, Sunanda claimed she would reveal everything she knew about Tharoor’s role in the IPL controversy in 2010.
Strangely, even after two and half years, the police is still not clear how she died. Though police registered a murder case last year after the AIIMS declared the “death was not natural”, they are still knocking on the doors of top forensic units to get a conclusive autopsy report.
The police even visited the US twice and sought help from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), yet they are not clear about the viscera report. Rather than focusing on viscera report for last two years, the police have ignored the basic investigation required for a murder case, as they initially claimed it was a suicide.
Though the final medical report from the AIIMS, which analysed the findings on her viscera sample done by a FBI lab in Washington, stated that her death was not natural, police still went to the US and sought further clarifications. The FBI, in its report, endorsed the AIIMS report given by Dr Sudhir Gupta stating poisoning as the cause and also said that a dangerous chemical present in her body might have killed her.
The police had formed a Special Investigative Team to probe the case but all the officers constituted initially have been transferred eventually. Sunanda, who married Tharoor in 2010, was found dead under mysterious circumstances inside a hotel room in Delhi on January 17, 2014. (With PTI Inputs)