This Article is From Jan 07, 2015

Delhi Police Say Death of Politician's Wife Was Murder

Delhi Police Say Death of Politician's Wife Was Murder

File photo of Sunanda Pushkar (Press Trust of India)

New Delhi: Almost a year after the shocking death of Sunanda Pushkar, the glamorous wife of a well-known South Indian member of Parliament, the Delhi Police have finally decided what to call it: murder.

B.S. Bassi, the Delhi Police commissioner, told reporters on Tuesday that the authorities believed that Pushkar ingested or was injected with poison. He said the police had filed a preliminary murder case while continuing their investigation. He did not name a suspect.

"On Dec. 29, the medical board gave us a report, and the main point in that report was one: The death was unnatural," Bassi said, adding that evidence samples would be sent abroad for testing to determine exactly which poison was used.

Pushkar had publicly accused her husband, the former Cabinet minister Shashi Tharoor, of infidelity, and the resulting scandal was reaching a fever pitch when she died suddenly last January at the age of 52. Tharoor, a former junior minister and United Nations official, has maintained that he believed that she died of natural causes.

The police announcement on Tuesday revived speculation about the case in the capital, with journalists rehashing a year of sometimes baffling twists while politicians weighed in along partisan lines.

Opponents of Tharoor and his party, the Indian National Congress Party, have suggested foul play from the beginning. Subramanian Swamy of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which now governs the country, said last year that the death was a "well-planned murder."

K.T.S. Tulsi, a Supreme Court lawyer and an appointed member of the upper house of Parliament, said on the Indian news channel NDTV that "the case is in danger of becoming a political football."

Bassi said that it took the police almost a year to lodge a murder case because the doctors who conducted the post-mortem examination and the medical board needed to collect more information and evidence to file their final report. Tharoor has expressed frustration with the slow pace of their work.

The doctor who led the post-mortem team said last summer that he had come under pressure to change his findings and had resisted, according to local news reports. The hospital where he works, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, denied that account in a statement, according to the Press Trust of India.

In the meantime, Indian news outlets have reported a series of leaked details about the case, including reports of a needle mark on Pushkar's wrist, bruises on her body and anti-anxiety pills found by her bed.

The couple's history has also been raked over. Tharoor and Pushkar wed in 2010, the third marriage for each of them, in the wake of a scandal that forced him to step down as a junior minister for foreign affairs. The scandal concerned allegations that he had improperly helped Pushkar obtain an ownership stake in a cricket franchise. Tharoor denied any financial wrongdoing.

A particularly communicative politician on social media, Tharoor reacted to the police announcement on Tuesday with a post on his Facebook page.

"I am stunned to hear that the Delhi Police have filed a case of murder against unknown persons in the demise of my late wife Sunanda," he wrote. He said he would cooperate fully with the police and hoped that "the unvarnished truth should come out."

Bassi, the police commissioner, did not return repeated calls for comment on Tuesday. 
© 2015, The New York Times News Service
.