A Delhi court on Tuesday summoned Congress leader Shashi Tharoor as an accused in the case concerning the death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar and asked him to appear before it on July 7.
Taking cognisance of the charge sheet filed by the police, Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal said there were sufficient grounds to proceed against Tharoor for commission of offences in the case.
In the charge sheet filed on May 14, the police had made a case of abetment to suicide (Section 306 IPC) and domestic cruelty (Section 498A IPC) against Shashi Tharoor.
On May 28, the court had reserved its order on summoning Congress MP Shashi Tharoor in connection with the death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar for June 5.
On 14 May, the Delhi Police had chrgesheeted Tharoor, the Lok Sabha MP representing Thiruvananthapuram, accusing him of abetting Pushkar’s suicide and told a city court that he should be summoned in the four-and-half year-old case, claiming there was sufficient evidence against him.
In a nearly 3,000-page charge sheet, the police had booked Tharoor under Sections 306 (abetment to suicide) and 498 A (cruelty in a marriage). Tharoor’s name appears in the ‘Column 2’ of the charge sheet, which makes him the most likely suspect.
As per information, the police had pointed out in the charge sheet that there were non-fatal injury marks on Sunanda’s body and she may have consumed prescription medicine Alprax.
As per a report in NDTV, Sunanda Pushkar emailed her husband, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, that she had “lost her will to live”. Her mail and messages on social media have been taken as a “dying declaration”, the police had told the court. “I have no desire to live…all I pray for is death,” Sunanda Pushkar wrote in the email to her husband on January 8, nine days before she was found dead in her suite at a luxury hotel in Delhi, NDTV reported.
The police had told the court that 27 tablets of Alprax were found in her room and it is not clear how many she had. Her death, the court was told, was due to poisoning.
Under section 498A, the maximum punishment is up to three years of imprisonment, while jail term up to 10 years is prescribed under section 306.
The police named Tharoor as the only accused while also alleging that he had subjected his wife to cruelty.
The couple’s domestic servant, Narayan Singh, has been named one of the key witnesses in the case.
Mystery shrouded Sunanda’s death from the night she was found dead. While police then suspected that she might have committed suicide, the possibility of prescription drug overdose was also not ruled out since Pushkar was undergoing medical treatment at the time of her death.
Even the FIR in the case could be registered about a year after her death.
The police sealed the suite where Sunanda was found dead and took the hotel management nearly three years to get it de-sealed with court’s intervention.
Tharoor was questioned a number of times during the course of investigations.
The charge-sheet quotes a special investigation team as stating that Shashi Tharoor ” as a husband ignored Sunanda when she was sliding or slipping into depression and she had Alprax.” They had frequent fights, it says. The entire charge sheet is, however, yet to be made public.
Meanwhile, Shashi tharoor released a written statement in response to Tuesday’s development, saying that the charges were “preposterous and baseless”, the product of a malicious and vindictive campaign against him. Here’s the tweet:
My statement on today’s news. pic.twitter.com/5zWf4PR9ue
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) June 5, 2018