Mystery of Sunanda Pushkar’s murder:  High Profile Congress Leader Shashi Tharoor under scanner!

-DR. ABDUL RUFF COLACHAL

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Sunanda Pushkar, who married India’s top diplomatic tactician Shashi Tharoor in 2010, was found dead a year ago at a five-star hotel in Delhi after publicly accusing Tharoor of having an extra-marital affair with a Pakistani journalist. Pushkar had checked into the Leela five-star Hotel in Chanakyapuri in the capital a day before her death on January 17, 2014. 50-year-old Sunanda was an Indo-Canadian businessperson with a lot of business and cricket mafia links.

Almost a year after Sunanda Pushkar, wife of then minister of state for human resource development, Shashi Tharoor, was found dead in a five-star hotel in New Delhi, the police on 06th January registered a case of murder, putting aside all the alternative and speculative theories revolving around her death. Shashi Tharoor is nervous over reported Sunanda’s murder as he, s as usual, refused to talk to media at New Delhi airport when asked about his reaction about the police revelation of her wife and an IPL owner Sunanda Pushkar‘s murder!

A new report on Sunanda’s death was completed on September 27 and received by the investigating officer, V K P S Yadav, on September 30.

The earlier IO, Atul Sood, was transferred a month ago and the ACP supervising the investigations, Surinder Sharma, retired in late September. The area DCP, too, was shifted to the traffic department a fortnight ago.

Shashi Tharoor, who earlier represented India as Asst Secretary general of United nations which is engaged more in arms-oil deals than any credible peace resolution efforts since all veto and other big powers successfully exercise their control over the discredited international forum making it redundant, is now for the first time in real trouble after one full year of death of his wife and an IPL boss in unnatural circumstances.

As a diplomat, Tharoor has so far maintained silence and has been very cool and casual about the death of his wife maybe mainly because he thinks he still has special privileges in India as an important former central minister.

Though he knew about Sunanda’s sudden “death”, reports suggest, Tharoor did not rush to the hotel room for some three hours where his wife was found dead with injuries. He never spoke anything about her death. In fact Indian media did not find it necessary to ask him for the cause. Indian government interfered with investigation process and even coerced the doctors to write a mischievous report about clinical investigation on her body.

Reports suggest Tharoor deliberately let the “eventuality” take place.

Former Union minister Shashi Tharoor may also be questioned by Delhi Police. Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Shashi Tharoor, was found dead in a five-star hotel room on January 17, 2014 in the capital this year.

In 2013, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned to death using the very hard to detect poison, namely radioactive polonium, which must have been administered to him along with his daily food, drinks and medication, said the final medical report. In 2006, the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who turned a counter spy and sought asylum in UK, was found dead under mysterious circumstances. It was later shown that he was poisoned by Russian agents who spiked his tea with substantial amounts of Po.  This poison seems to be very effective and hence it was chosen to kill Sunanda.

Found dead or killed!

In New Delhi, where all sorts of illegal operations, including casino, IPL, liquor-money bag flows, etc take place quietly, murder of Sunanda is not a big surprise but Tharoor’s cool approach to the her death creates confusion in all circles, even though IPL, which brought Tharoor and Sunanda together,  was said to be  the cause of her death.

The Delhi police on this January 06 revealed that Sunanda was poisoned and that the poison was either administered to her by mouth or injection. The police have relied on medical and forensic reports while registering a case under section 302 of the IPC. "We have got the final medical report from AIIMS, and we have been told that it was an unnatural death... It was not a natural death," Delhi Police chief B S Bassi told the media. "She died due to poisoning. Whether the poison was given orally or injected into her body is being investigated," he said, adding the report from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) was received on Dec 29. The quantum of poison given to Pushkar, who was 52, had not yet been ascertained.

"For that we will send her viscera abroad."

Delhi Police Commissioner B S Bassi said the police took one year to file the case as the report submitted by AIIMS initially was just an interim report and not a conclusive one. Several clarifications were sought since the report on September 30 in which the viscera findings came negative for poison, to December 29 in which the doctors have maintained that the death was ‘sudden and unnatural’ due to ‘poisoning’, which led to delay.

A murder case had now been registered against unknown persons at Delhi's Sarojini Nagar police station, the police chief said. A special team led by DCP (south) Prem Nath and additional DCP (south) Kushwah has been formed to investigate the case. The police will go for a re-investigation in the case which was earlier being probed under 174 CrPC, treating the death as unnatural.

A day before she was found dead, Tharoor and Pushkar had issued a joint statement saying they were distressed by a row over some unauthorized tweets posted from their Twitter account. Pushkar had tweeted from Tharoor's account and her own accusing Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar of interfering in their marriage. The statement claimed that distorted accounts of comments allegedly made by Pushkar, alleging an affair between her husband and a Pakistani journalist, had led to some erroneous conclusions. A report has quoted the domestic help of the couple as saying that a mysterious Sunil had visited her before her death and helped her tweet allegations against her husband.

There is a general perception in public that anybody else would have been in jail long ago, but Tharoor, hailing from Kerala with powerful mafias, including cricket and football, has been safe for various reasons. As Central minister, however, did not raise any objections to the murder of 3 Keralites on Sea in Kerala by Italian Navy personnel from a ship and also helped Italian government to let the state criminals return to Italy.  Indian government led by Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh was very sympathetic to Italian criminals maybe because Sonia belongs to Italy. Similarly, the government has shielded Shashi Tharoor.

Sudhir Kumar Gupta, who headed the forensic team in AIIMS, alleged that he was pressured to show that Pushkar's death was natural. The medical team probing the death of Sunanda Pushkar has concluded that she died of poisoning. The team comprised three doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and was headed by Dr Sudhir Gupta, who had earlier alleged that the team was pressured into giving a 'tailor-made' report in the case.

The report said the identity of a mysterious visitor to Sunanda was not verifiable, it also has little value as evidence since it was a statement made before the police and does not constitute evidence in the case.

The report comes in the wake of the CFSL's viscera report that found Sunanda's heart, liver and kidneys to be normal. In the report, the team lambasted Delhi Police for not submitting several crucial documents required to form a medical opinion. It said the cops did not submit any report on the reason for the injuries in Sunanda's body.

The team also said an analysis of circumstantial evidence in the case was required to be carried out but wasn't.

From what has been said it is quite clear Tharoor knows about the murder of his wife and perhaps even had expecting the “incident” for days.

Investigation

The medical investigation into Sunanda Pushkar's death took many twists and turns through the past year. The first autopsy report, submitted to a magistrate on January 20 last year, had said that Tharoor's wife died due to drug overdose. But it also reported a dozen injury marks on her body. The final autopsy report that came out in July put the number of injury marks at 15. All the injuries were caused by blunt forces except one which was an injection mark. The report did not name the specific poison or chemical that caused the death. Instead, it listed a number of poisons that cannot be detected in Indian labs. These include thallium, polonium 210 (a radioactive substance of which a few milligrams is lethal), nerium oleander, snake venom, photolabile poisons and heroin.

Among the 15 injuries the team examined on Sunanda's body, it found 'injury number 10' to be a mark caused by the needle of a syringe. The team found no traces of anti-anxiety drug Alprax in her stomach, despite two strips containing 15 pills each of the drug being found next to the body. What the team found was ethyl alcohol, caffeine, acetaminophen and continue in Sunanda's body. It has asked for forensic analysis of Sunanda's bedsheet and pillow cover.

After a series of exchanges between the AIIMS autopsy board and the police that included two post-mortem reports and lists of several queries, sources said police registered a case of murder in the death of Sunanda Pushkar after the conclusive report mentioned that “homicide cannot be ruled out in the matter”. The board reportedly told the police that homicide cannot be ruled out as the sudden and unnatural death occurred due to poisoning. It is, however, not established if the poison was administered orally or injected. The AIIMS doctors, however, maintained that they have stuck to the findings that they gave in their initial report and have not mentioned “homicide” in the report.

Also, the police were asked to investigate a few things pointed out by AIIMS, included submission of photographs of the crime spot, forensic testing of the mattress where Pushkar was found and statement of the doctor who attended to Pushkar after her death at the hotel. Inquest proceedings in the matter were on, the police said.

Earlier, Tharoor had been accused of interfering in the autopsy and medical probe and the autopsy head Sudhir Gupta had raised the matter in CAT as well. The police have now formed a special team to investigate the murder case and several persons including Shashi.

Shashi Tharoor has alleged that Delhi Police was trying to make his staff confess that he and his domestic help Narayan Singh had murdered Sunanda Pushkar. Tharoor had written a letter to Delhi Police commissioner, saying they should stop interrogating and harassing his staff. Tharoor had called up the Delhi Police commissioner and also sent an email, sources said. Tharoor said that four Delhi Police officers interrogated his domestic help Narayan Singh last month - for

16 hours on November 7 and for 14 hours on November 8. Tharoor recalled that he expressed his concerns to Bassi over telephone on November 8 night.

AIIMS forensic department head stuck to his controversial claim that he was pressurized to manipulate the post mortem report of Sunanda Pushkar. A medical board of AIIMS constituted to conduct the post-mortem examination concluded on September 30 that the death was due to poisoning. The Delhi Police had sought clarifications from the board. The medical team conducted the autopsy along with teams from the Central Forensic Sciences Laboratory and the police. The evidence collected by the teams was incorporated into the December report based on which a first information report under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code was registered.

The Delhi Police Special Investigation Team probing the case shall ask Shashi to meet the teas in due course.

Interrogations and Evidences

The SIT interrogated Shashi Tharoor's domestic help, Narain Singh and he was reportedly asked about details of the people with whom Pushkar was apparently in touch on email and different social media including Twitter. Singh's interrogation came a day after a letter, written by Tharoor in November last year to the Delhi Police Commissioner, surfaced in which the Congress MP from Kerala accused investigators of "assaulting" and "intimidating" Singh into "confessing" that they both killed Sunanda. The sources said Singh was asked whether Sunanda was suffering from any ailments and was there any medication she was taking. He was specifically asked about the Tablet Alprax, two used strips of which were found in her room in Leela Palace hotel. "He was also asked about the 15 injuries found on her body, especially 'injury number 10' which was termed as a mark caused by the needle of a syringe," the sources said.

Narain Singh said to the Delhi police in November that the couple had a fight in their room earlier in which Pushkar had hit Tharoor and he had been hurt in the leg and an individual identified only as 'Sunil sahab' had visited Pushkar on 15 January in Leela Hotel. Singh told the police in his statement that Pushkar had gone to the room with 'Sunil sahib' and began tweeting from his phone and copying data from it. He also reportedly said that she had called Tharoor that night and told him "Aap khatam ho gaye (you are finished)" since she had disclosed all to the media. He was called by the SIT from his home in Himachal Pradesh for questioning. Narain, who was interrogated extensively in the first week of November, has given a detailed account of the chain of events on January 16 and 17, the day Sunanda died. He also recalled a fight between the couple in Dubai.

Narain also claimed that Sunanda called up Tharoor and told him he was "finished" as she had disclosed everything to the media, according to his statement given to the police in Hindi that was accessed by TOI.

"I have been working with sahab (Tharoor) since October 22, 2010. My work is to cook meals for madam (Sunanda) and sahab and iron clothes besides doing other things. For the past one year (before Sunanda's death), there were frequent fights between madam and sahab. Last year in December, I had gone to Dubai and sahab and madam came later.

There, I saw the first big fight between the two; I don't know the reason. Madam hit sahab and he wast hurt in the leg. Madam told sahab that 'you don't care for me even when I am unwell and have been glued to your phone'," he said.

Recalling the incidents of January 15, Narain mentioned a fight and the events that followed it. "Madam went to room number 307 with Sunil sahab and started tweeting on sahab's phone and copying stuff from there. He says that later two friends of madam and the mysterious 'Sunil sahib' came over. "Sahab came on Jan 16 and asked me to switch on the TV. I was not feeling well and I went home. Later, when I came back, I found that they had shifted to (Room no. 345) and madam was not taking calls," he told the cops. "Madam asked me to call sahab, and when sahab didn't answer, she asked me to send Bajrangi (the other

help) home. Tharoor was at their home at Lodhi Estate. Later, when madam called sahab, he said he was packing for his Jaipur trip and that he would be back. He returned around 12.30am. After that madam and sahab fought till 4.30am. In the morning, between 4.30am and 5am, madam was speaking to someone on the phone. They fought till 6.30am (January 17) and sahab went to the other room," Narain told the cops.

He said Tharoor called him up around 4.30pm on January 17 to ask about Sunanda's health and he had told him that she did not eat properly.

"He asked me to wake her up and I did (try to do so) but she didn't respond. Later sahab came and then told the manager to call the doctor. The doctor said she had died after which sahab's  PA informed the police. The police came after half an hour," said Narain.

BJP leader Subramanian Swamy alleged that former union minister Shashi Tharoor knew about his wife Sunanda Pushkar's killer, and added that the Congress leader has been trying to cover up the case by telling lies.  Tharoor did not kill her, but Tharoor knows who killed her and facilitated her killing. He told lies and tried to cover up, so he will also be sent to jail, but won't get capital punishment. ..I think our police is now active, those elements that wanted to suppress the case are no more in power," he added.

The report forced Delhi Police to register an FIR in the case as none has been filed so far under section 302 of IPC on the basis of an AIIMS medical report that concluded that her death was unnatural and due to poisoning. The case has been investigated through inquest proceedings, that is, as a case of unnatural death.

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. The Delhi Police Special Investigation Team probing the case shall ask Shashi to meet the teas in due course.

Last words

Sunanda reportedly spent 72 tumultuous hours before her murder as she was depressed, ate little and slept late. Sunanda , rather was murdered, just hours before she was supposed to give interviews to top India media channels in India and obviously at least one of the media lord has alerted the concerned gang that must have gone ahead with the murder of IPL lady.  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.”  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 According to reports, Delhi Police had earlier issued a legal notice to Shashi Tharoor asking him to join the murder probe of his wife Sunanda Pushkar at the earliest.

An impression has been created by the government that nothing will happen about the case which will like many other similar cases end just like that. . Already some crucial evidences about the murder case might have been destroyed. Perhaps, the police has been silently collecting crucial evidences.

The fresh statements of those being interrogated by the police are expected to be matched with the ones they had given to the SDM who had carried out an inquest proceeding in the case. The evidence in the case so far has raised more questions than answer the existing ones.

Now that Delhi police has finally  confirmed to the world  that Suanada’s was a  murder,  the criminal or  criminal gang  responsible for the ghastly crimes ought to be  brought out, quickly enough.  And Indian media outlets must have a separate section on the subject matter on day to day basis until the issue is fully exposed and the guilty punished.

According to the latest reports Delhi police has sent the samples to UK for investigation. However, one has no clue as to how much pressure Indian government or Congress party would place on British government to “help” India.  Since India has cultivated the notorious habit of helping western state criminals in India, like saving the Italian Naval criminals who killed innocent Indians on Arabian sea, One doubts if India regime would not help the criminal gang involved in the ghastly murder of Sunanda.