New Delhi, Jan. 8: Delhi police today said they would question Shashi Tharoor’s friend and Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar about her online spat with Sunanda Pushkar in the days before the latter’s death by poisoning.
An officer said the police would email a questionnaire to Tarar. If she did not cooperate, “We will seek the external affairs ministry’s help to record her statement.”
Sunanda was found dead in a hotel suite she was sharing with husband Tharoor, a Congress MP and then a minister, in January last year. In her final days, she had posted a series of tweets accusing Tarar of stalking Tharoor.
Police sources claimed a distraught Sunanda had told her friends that she suspected an affair.
“We’ll record Tarar’s statement because we need to know the reasons behind the full-blown row between her and Sunanda,” the officer said.
Tarar yesterday told a television channel that she was “willing to answer every question” the Delhi police had.
“So far, the cops haven’t reached out to me,” she said. “We should let the police do its work and stop media trials.”
The police have been tight-lipped over the possible murder motive. A day before Sunanda’s death, a joint statement attributed to her and Tharoor said they were “happily married”.
A member of the investigating team said the police were examining Sunanda’s call details and the BBM messages she had exchanged with her friends and Tharoor.
The FIR
On Tuesday, the police registered a murder case against “unknown persons” after a medical board’s final report suggested death by poisoning.
The board was non-committal whether the poisoning was “unwitting” or forcible, and whether it was taken orally or injected.
The FIR says: “The poisoning is through oral route, however injectable route too also can’t be ruled out.”
It says that of the 15 injury marks on Sunanda’s body, one was an “injection mark”. Another is described as “a teeth bite mark”.
The rest were “caused by blunt force, simple in nature, non-contributing to death and are produced in scuffle,” the FIR says. It adds that the various injuries were suffered at different times, “ranging from 12 hours to 4 days” before death.
The autopsy had suggested poisoning but the viscera report initially denied any trace of poison. Eventually, a revised viscera report confirmed poisoning but failed to identify the poison.
The challenge
Former police commissioner Ved Marwah said the investigators would need to corroborate the murder claim with “material evidence”.
“The viscera, being sent abroad to ascertain the nature of the poison, will be crucial but other evidence is needed, including the motive, to prove murder in court,” he said.
Soon after Sunanda died, Tharoor’s driver and some of his other staff had allegedly told the police the couple had fought frequently in the days before her death.
But Tharoor has accused the police of “repeatedly assaulting” and “intimidating” his domestic help Narayan Singh to get him to “confess” that he and Tharoor had together murdered Sunanda.
The police this morning questioned six persons, including Narayan, “for three to four hours”, a source said. Narayan arrived in Delhi from Himachal Pradesh this morning in answer to police summons received yesterday.
“Of the six questioned, two were in the hotel suite at the time of the incident,” an officer said, adding that Narayan was one of them.
Police commissioner B.S. Bassi clarified that Tharoor, who is in Kerala, had not been sent any legal notice to make himself available for a recording of his statement.
Officers said more among Tharoor’s staff as well as the hotel employees would be questioned.
“We’ll question them again along with IPS officer Abhinav Kumar, who was then Tharoor’s private secretary and was the first to inform the police about Sunanda’s death,” a source said.
