In a U-turn, the Delhi Police on Thursday denied issuing any notice to former union minister and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, in connection with the mysterious death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar.
Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi said the Special Investigation Team (SIT), set up to probe the case, is preparing a list of key eyewitnesses and has not issued any notices to anyone so far.
Bassi’s remarks came shortly after reports quoted Tharoor as saying that he had not received any notice from the police.
Delhi Police had said that they had issued a notice to the ex-minister asking him to join investigation into the mysterious death of his wife at the earliest.
“A legal notice has been issued to Tharoor to join the murder probe. The questioning will be held under Section 160 of CrPC,” news agencies had quoted an unnamed senior police official as saying.
Tharoor, who is currently at an Ayurvedic Hospital in Kerala, is likely to leave the facility tomorrow.
The police had on Tuesday registered a case of murder under Section 302 of IPC in the death case of Sunanda Pushkar.
BJP leader Subramanian Swamy called on Tharoor to speak the truth.
“Truth has already come out, it’s now for Shashi Tharoor to speak the truth,” he said.
Delhi Police had registered a case of murder on Tuesday, after receiving the final report from the board of doctors at AIIMS which conducted post-mortem on Pushkar.
The report concluded that Pushkar died from poisoning.
On Wednesday, Bassi announced that an SIT has been formed to probe the case afresh.
On Wednesday, a letter emerged in which Tharoor alleged that a police officer tried to implicate him and a domestic help in Sunanda’s mysterious death.
In the letter written to the Delhi Police Commissioner dated November 13 last year, Tharoor urged the police chief to take action against the officer.
Tharoor said four police officers interrogated his domestic help Narayan Singh for 16 hours on November 7 and for 14 hours on November 8. On both days, he alleged that Narayan Singh was repeatedly physically assaulted by an officer.
“Worse, that officer used the traumatic physical assault to try and intimidate Narayan into ‘confessing’ that he and I murdered my wife,” said Tharoor.
He quoted Bassi as telling him that the officer’s conduct was “completely unacceptable and illegal”.
