Sunanda Pushkar case: Evidence till today indicates death was not natural, says Bassi

Delhi Police Chief BS Bassi while talking to the media has claimed that evidence till date indicates that Sunanda Pushkar's death was not natural. He was responding to reporters after the Delhi Police on Friday received the AIIMS medical board's 'advice' on the FBI lab report on Sunanda Pushkar's viscera samples. Sunanda was the wife of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.

Bassi promised to reveal the conclusion of the report soon and refused to make a direct comment at this stage. "Till today evidence indicates tha the death was unnatural, I can't comment about the future developments and evidence that we might gather during the course of investigations," he said.

Sunanda was found dead inside her suite at a five-star hotel here in January 2014, a day after she was involved in a spat with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar on Twitter over the latter's alleged affair with Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram.

Sunanda's viscera samples were sent to the FBI lab in Washington DC in February 2015 to determine the kind of poison that killed her after an AIIMS medical board identified poisoning as the reason behind her death but did not mention any specific substance.

The FBI report had virtually ruled out the theory of 'polonium poisoning' having caused her death. However, after the Delhi police failed to draw any conclusion on the basis of the findings, the report was handed over to a medical board for examination before further proceedings in the high-profile case.

The investigators have so far conducted polygraph tests on six persons, all prime witnesses in the case, including Tharoors' domestic help Narayan Singh, driver Bajrangi and Sanjay Dewan, a close friend of the couple. Tharoor has been questioned in the case.