Medical panel submits ‘inconclusive report’ on Sunanda Pushkar’s death
Investigators said they are now counting on her Blackberry Messenger chat transcripts to provide some clues.
A medical board appointed to look into the findings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and All India Institute of Medical Sciences in connection with Sunanda Pushkar’s death has filed an “inconclusive report”, The Indian Express said. The FBI and AIIMS reports had indicated Pushkar was poisoned, but they could not narrow down the type of substance.
“A competent board conducted Sunanda Pushkar’s postmortem. We concluded that her death was caused due to poisoning and was unnatural,” AIIMS Forensic Department chief Sudhir Gupta told ANI.
The Special Investigation team probing the case is now hoping that Blackberry Messenger chat transcripts will provide more clues into the mysterious death of the wife of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor. Officials said a United States court had granted the investigators permission to fast track the transfer of Pushkar’s chat transcripts to them after they had discovered that a section had been deleted. A forensic report, from an Ahmedabad laboratory, on Pushkar’s laptop is also awaited.
The medical panel, set up in June 2016, included four doctors from Delhi, Chandigarh and Puducherry.
Pushkar was found dead inside her suite at a five-star hotel in New Delhi on January 17, 2014. A Special Investigation Team had questioned Pakistani journalist Tarar in connection with Pushkar’s death. Tarar had been involved in a Twitter spat with Pushkar a day before her death. Earlier, her husband Tharoor had also been accused of misusing his ministerial position to ask for free stake in the Indian Premier Leage. It was alleged that Pushkar was acting as his proxy. The massive scandal led to Tharoor resigning as minister of state for external affairs.
In January 2015, the Delhi Police registered a murder case after an AIIMS medical board said poisoning caused her death. Pushkar’s viscera samples were sent to the FBI lab in Washington DC in February 2015 to determine the kind of poison. The FBI had ruled out radioactive chemicals as a cause of death.