Murder Case Registered Over Sunanda Pushkar Death

Sunanda Puskhar Tharoor (R), wife of India's Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor, poses with her husband at the Indian F1 Grand Prix at the Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi, October 27, 2013. — Reuters/file

NEW DELHI: Indian police on Tuesday registered a murder case against unknown persons over the death of Sunanda Pushkar, claiming the wife of the Shashi Tharoor was killed by poisoning, according to a Times of India report.

"We have got the final medical report from AIIMS, and we have been told that it was an unnatural death... It was not a natural death," Delhi Police chief B S Bassi told mediapersons.

"Sunanda died due to poisoning. Whether the poison was given orally or injected into her body is being investigated," he said adding that the report from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) was received on Dec 29.


“We can only say which substance caused the poisoning after further investigation,” Bassi further said adding that, "For that we will send her viscera abroad."

Pushkar was a Dubai-based entrepreneur before she married Shashi Tharoor in 2010.

 She was found dead in a five-star hotel in New Delhi under mysterious circumstances on Jan 17 last year, a day after she had accused Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar of “stalking” her husband and of trying to “break” her marriage when she was away for medical treatment for three months.

Tarar had denied Pushkar’s accusation of an affair between her and the former high-flying UN diplomat.

KP Govt Offers Rs. 10(mn) Bounty For TTP's Mullah Fazlullah

Undated photo taken from video by the TTP's Umar Media propaganda wing shows chief of the banned group Mullah Fazlullah.

ISLAMABAD: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on Monday announced a bounty worth Rs10 million rupees (US$100,000) for information leading to the arrest or death of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief, Mullah Fazlullah, officials said.

“The provincial government has set a bounty of Rs10 million for any information/help that can lead to the arrest or killing of TTP chief Mullah Fazlullah,” a senior official in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government told AFP, requesting anonymity.

He said that the KP government had prepared a list of 615 high profile militants and was offering a combined bounty of Rs760 million (US$7.5 million).

The official said the list also includes Mangal Bagh, chief of Lashkar-i-Islam, a Taliban-linked militant group operating in the Khyber tribal district.

Mushtaq Ghani, the provincial information minister confirmed the bounty.

Meanwhile, the country's parliament deferred voting on legislation regarding the establishment of military courts for terror-related cases until Tuesday, after the chief of a religious party objected to the contents of the national plan of action.

The bill will be presented in parliament on Tuesday for voting, after which military courts will be made legal. At present the military courts deal only with cases related to the military.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had announced the establishment of military courts for terror-related cases after a deadly Taliban attack on military-run school in Peshawar that killed more than 148 people, 134 of them children.

The prime minister also ended the country's six-year-old moratorium on the death penalty in terror cases last month in the wake of the slaughter at the school.

Seven convicted militants have been hanged since the de facto ban on capital punishment ended.
Six of those executed were found guilty of trying to assassinate the then-military dictator Musharraf in Rawalpindi in 2003 and the seventh was sentenced in connection with a 2009 attack on the army headquarters.

Officials have said they plan to hang 500 convicts in the coming weeks, drawing condemnation from international human rights campaigners.