Deepening the mystery behind the alleged murder of Sunanda Pushkar, a two-month-old letter from her husband and MP Shashi Tharoor, in which he accuses the Delhi Police of trying to frame him, surfaced on Wednesday.
In the letter to Delhi Police Commissioner B.S. Bassi on November 12, Mr. Tharoor said a police officer had repeatedly assaulted one of his servants to intimidate him into giving a statement that that the two of them had murdered Ms. Pushkar.
In another development, Sudhir K. Gupta, Professor and Head of Forensic Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, who headed the panel which conducted the post-mortem on Sunanda, said he had never recommended that it was a homicide. “All we have said is that the cause of death is poison,” he said. “The three-member panel which conducted the post-mortem did not mention ‘homicide’ in its findings and it found ‘poisoning’ as the cause of her death.” It was on the basis of the AIIMS forensic team’s report that a case of murder was registered. Mr. Tharoor’s letter documents the conversation between him and Mr. Bassi on November 8 following two sessions of interrogation of the domestic help Shri Narayan Singh.
“I was therefore shocked and appalled to learn that in the course of the 16-hour interrogation conducted by four Delhi Police officers on November 7 and again during the 14-hour interrogation on November 8, my domestic help Narayan Singh was repeatedly physically assaulted by one of your officers,” he says in the letter.
“Worse, the officer used the traumatic physical assault to try and intimidate Narayan into ‘confessing’ that he and I murdered my wife.”
Without identifying the officer in the letter, Mr. Tharoor demanded action against him/her.
“Listed among the possibility (of poison) is Polonium-210, a rare and highly radioactive isotope, which is hard to detect because all the radiation remains in the body. A lethal dose could be as little as a few milligrams, which could be administered as a powder or dissolved in liquid/drinks,” said the AIIMS report. >Read more…
The final report, prepared by the Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences after studying the viscera report, says Sunanda’s death was caused by “poison” and not by an “overdose of Alprax.” This contradicts the preliminary report, which said “Alprax” was detected in the body. >Read more…
Eminent forensic scientist P. Chandrasekharan, who served as the principal scientific investigator in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, said the death of Sunanda Pushkar was “accidental and self-induced” >Read more…
.Shashi Tharoor refused to comment on the controversy stirred by a senior AIIMS forensic doctor’s allegation that he was pressured to manipulate the post mortem report of Sunanda Pushkar >Read more…
AIIMS forensic department head stuck to his controversial claim that he was pressurized to manipulate the post mortem report of Sunanda Pushkar >Read more…
Family sources told The Hindu that Sunanda Pushkar was deeply stressed after she dramatically tweeted messages suggesting a romantic relationship between her husband and Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar. >Read more…
