NEW DELHI: After two and half years, Delhi Police on Tuesday realized that they will not be able to probe the financial irregularities into the now defunct Indian Premier League team Kochi Tuskers related to the mysterious murder of the socialite and Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar.
The Delhi Police have written to the Enforcement Directorate to investigating the financial motive behind the murder.
Sources said that RP Upadhyaya, Joint commissioner of Delhi, heading the Pushkar murder case has written a letter to Enforcement Directorate’s director Karnal Singh to investigate the financial aspect and it is may spread across several countries.
So far, Economic Offence Wing of Delhi Police was probing the financial aspect. Strangely, Delhi Police top investigators realized the handover the financial aspect probe to Enforcement Directorate after a lapse of two years.
To probe IPL angle in murder, Delhi Police had examined three TV journalists whom she allegedly contacted before her death in January 2014. Sources said that Sunanda 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 that she would reveal everything she knew about Tharoor’s role in the IPL controversy in 2010.
Last year, the then Commissioner of Police BS Bassi had given Economic Offence Wing to probe the financial angle into the murder.
Strangely, even after a lapse of two and half years, the police is still not clear how she died.
Though, police have registered a murder case last year after AIIMS declared that “death was not natural”, they are still knocking doorstop forensic units to gets the conclusive autopsy report. The police even visited the US twice and also sought help from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), yet they are not clear about viscera report.
Rather focusing on viscera report for last two years, the police have ignored the basic investigation into a murder case as it initially claimed that it was a suicide case.
Though the final a medical report from AIIMS, which analyzed findings on her viscera sample by a Federal Bureau of Investigations lab in Washington, stated that her death was not natural, police still went to the US and sought further clarifications.
Interestingly, the FBI in its report had endorsed the AIIMS report given by Dr Sudhir Gupta of poisoning as the cause and also saying that a dangerous chemical was present in her body that may 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 room at the Leela Palace Hotel in Delhi on January 17, 2014. Police registered a murder case on January 1, 2015. Prior to her death, Sunanda was embroiled in a spat with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar, whom she accused of stalking her husband.