NEW DELHI: To unravel the mysterious death of socialite Sunanda Pushkar, Delhi Police grilled her widower and Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Saturday for nearly five hours in the national capital.
Tharoor was questioned regarding the presence of Alprazolam tablets in the hotel room where Sunandawas found dead. When he denied purchasing Alprazolam tablets, sources said, he was asked “if he didn’t purchase the medicines then who bought them for Sunanda”. He was also questioned regarding Sunanda’s treatment at the Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences, police chief B S Bassi said. The investigators are now waiting for the All India Institute of Medical Science report on the explanation sought by the SIT formed to probe the death.
“The All India Institute of Medical Science is likely to submit the report on February 19, 2016. This will decide whether a polygraph test would be conducted on Tharooror not,” the source said. Two years after her death and several postmortem reports and viscera reports later, Bassi and his team maintain that she was murdered. The reports were sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States even as the AIIMS medical board hadstated that her death was “unnatural”.
Surprisingly, the investigating agency sent insufficient quantity of samples to the FBI laboratory and as a result, experts of the FBI Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia, could not reach any conclusion to determine the presence of radioactive substances in the body.
The final report prepared by the AIIMS after studying the FBI’s findings states that Sunanda died of poisoning due to the excess intake of Alprazolam. The AIIMS medical board, which analysed the FBI report before giving its final opinion last week, has expressed concern about the investigation carried out by police in the high-profile case and about the credibility of forensic laboratory report in the country.
The FBI report, detected Alprazolam in all the viscera samples, stomach and its contents, spleen, liver section, half of each kidney.
The medical board said in its report: “This is a grave issue of concern for our legal investigation system and the legal/scientific sanctity of the viscera examination, which raises serious medical and legal apprehension about the quality of forensic lab report/supervision of legal investigation /accountability in cases of death investigation.”