Police trying to frame me, says Tharoor

New Delhi, January 7: A day after police said Sunda Pushkar was poisoned, her husband and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor alleged in a letter made public on Wednesday that a police officer tried to implicate him and a domestic help in her mysterious death.

In a letter to Delhi Commissioner of Police B.S. Bassi dated November 13, Tharoor, a former central minister, urged the police chief to take action against the officer.

Tharoor said four police officers interrogated his domestic help rayan Singh for 16 hours on November 7 and for 14 hours on November 8. On both days, he alleged that rayan Singh was repeatedly physically assaulted by an officer.

“Worse, that officer used the traumatic physical assault to try and intimidate rayan into ‘confessing’ that he and I murdered my wife,” said Tharoor.

He quoted Bassi as telling him that the officer’s conduct was “completely ucceptable and illegal”. The Congress leader, later nomited by Prime Minister rendra Modi as an ambassador for the Clean India campaign, said the police action amounted “to the use of physical coercion in the attempt to frame an innocent man.

“I request you to take immediate and appropriate action against such unlawful misconduct of the officer.”

He said he and his staff had always made themselves available for any investigation “but the behaviour of the officers towards my staff is a matter of serious concern to any law abiding citizen”. The letter became public knowledge a day after Delhi Police announced that Pushkar, who was found dead in a luxury hotel here a year ago, was actually poisoned to death.

Meanwhile, a police team formed to investigate afresh Pushkar’s murder has begun work. “The special team is looking into each and every possibility of the case. Whatever is needed will be done,” Bassi told the media. IANS