New Delhi: Delhi police on Monday accused Congress leader Shashi Tharoor of abetting the suicide of his wife Sunanda Pushkar in the latest twist in the four-year-old probe that had earlier seen a murder case being registered without attributing a motive.
"Tharoor has been charged under Sections 306 (abetment to suicide) and 498A (husband or his relative subjecting a woman to cruelty) of the Indian Penal Code. The chargesheet was filed on the basis of medico-legal and forensic evidence," a Delhi police official told The Telegraph.
Tharoor, the only person named a suspect by the police, called the chargesheet "preposterous" and said he intended to "contest it vigorously".
"No one who knew Sunanda believes she would ever have committed suicide, let alone abetment on my part. If this is conclusion arrived at after 4+ yrs of investigation it does not speak well of the methods or motivations of the Delhi Police," the Thiruvananthapuram MP tweeted
"In Oct 17, the Law Officer made a statement in the Delhi High Court that they have not found anything against anyone & now in 6 months they say that I have abetted a suicide. unbelievable!"
The Congress said the "abetment of suicide" charge was a new plot as the BJP and a section of the media had failed to get him entangled in the murder charge. "There is neither a suicide note, nor a witness. This is part of the Modi government's vendetta politics," party leader Randeep Surjewala said.
Sunanda was found dead on January 17, 2014, in a Delhi hotel suite she was sharing with her husband. Empty Alprax (alprazolam) strips were found by her bedside and sources had told the cops she had been taking the anti-depressant tablets. The couple had got married in August 2010.
In their chargesheet filed before metropolitan magistrate Dharmendra Singh, the police alleged that Tharoor had subjected his wife to cruelty. Singh will consider the over 3,000-page chargesheet on May 24.
Asked what evidence the police had to charge Tharoor under Section 306, the Delhi police officer said: "We do not have enough evidence against him. He is a suspect in the case and has been charged under the relevant sections of the IPC as the chargesheet clearly mentions marital discord as the cause of suicide." Under Section 306, a person can be jailed for up to 10 years if found guilty.
M.S. Khan, a trial court lawyer, said it would be tough for the prosecution to prove charges of abetment to suicide. "There is no suicide note in the case. The police case rests mainly on Sunanda's friends' statements which the police have mentioned in the chargesheet saying Tharoor neglected his wife," he said.
The police team probing the case had initially alleged "pressure" from certain quarters. The political heat had increased following the change of government at the Centre in May 2014.
In January 2015, then Delhi police commissioner B.S. Bassi had claimed Sunanda was murdered and cited "poisoning" as the cause of death, giving the case a sensational turn considering the police's failure to attribute any motive, contradictory medical and forensic reports, and failure to identify the poison.
An AIIMS team that had done the first post-mortem had said alprazolam overdose was the cause of death. In April 2014 the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Hyderabad had denied that poisoning was the cause before making a U-turn seven months later after being asked to do a second test. But it didn't identify the poison.
Delhi police later sent the viscera to the FBI following a nod from the home ministry. In January 2016, the US agency concluded that Sunanda died of an overdose of alprazolam. The FBI report, however, said it had failed to measure the amount of alprazolam in Sunanda's body because of the poor way the viscera samples had been preserved by the Hyderabad lab.
A medical board formed with AIIMS experts to study the FBI report had said: "The circumstantial recovery of empty Alprax tablets (27 tablets) and report of the FBI which shows the presence of Alprax in stomach and its contents, spleen, liver section, half of each kidney, blood sample, as well as urine wet clothing, bed cover and bed sheet confirmed the death is due to excessive ingestion of tablet alprazolam."
