New Delhi: The team investigating the Sunanda Pushkar death case has made a startling statement before the court, claiming that Pushkar, wife of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor was suffering from mental agony due to a strained relationship with her husband.
The team told Special Judge Ajay Kumar Jha that the postmortem report hints at poisoning being the cause of Pushkar’s death and that 15 injury marks were found on her body caused by the blunt force produced in a scuffle. Alleging that the couple may have had a scuffle few days before her death, the police said that the deteriorating relationship may have driven Pushkar to death.
Special public prosecutor Atul Shrivastava told the court that Tharoor’s relation with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar also added to Sunanda’s mental agony.
Pushkar’s friend and journalist Nalini Singh’s statement has been added to charge sheet and it states that the relation between the couple as ‘tense and bad’. Singh had told that she had received a call from Pushkar, who was upset and wanted revenge from Tharoor and Tarar. “She had found some messages between Tharoor and Tarar and she did not want to go to their home, instead went to Leela Hotel,” the statement of the journalist adds.
The prosecutor said that emails between Tharoor and Tarar show that they were intimate to each other.
Meanwhile, Senior advocate Vikas Pahwa, appearing for Tharoor rejected the submission and said that he was unaware of any such mail.
The case is now listed for next hearing on August 31. The former Union minister, who is currently on bail in the case, was charged by the Delhi Police under Sections 498-A (husband or his relative subjecting a woman to cruelty) and 306 (abetment of suicide) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
Pushkar, 51, was found dead in a suite of the Hotel Leela, in Delhi’s Chanakyapuri, on the night of January 17, 2014, merely a day after an ugly public spat on twitter with her husband over his alleged affair with Tarar.
