Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday took to Twitter to express his anger over a news channel’s report that has tried to implicate him in his wife Sunanda Pushkar’s death in 2014. “A so-called journalist comes [out] with an agenda to disrupt the rest of the media in order to create attention for his channel. Not interested in truth,” he said, referring to Republic TV anchor Arnab Goswami.
On Monday, Goswami’s new venture had aired what it claimed were audio tapes between one of the channel’s reporters and an aide of Tharoor’s. The tapes purportedly prove that Pushkar’s body had been moved from one room to another at the Leela Palace Hotel in New Delhi on January 17, 2014, the night she had died.
“This deeply angers and saddens me when someone exploits a personal tragedy,” Tharoor told reporters on Tuesday, according to The Indian Express. “I have nothing to hide and have fully cooperated with the police. So far, the probe has not established the crime or whether any murder occurred.”
The MP from Thiruvananthapuram also appeared to lose his temper when a reporter of the news channel was heard asking him several questions. “Tried to say a few words to them but kept being interrupted by a cretin seeking to make the news, not report it,” he later wrote on Twitter.
In its Monday night bulletin, Republic TV had broadcast the tapes it claimed were evidence against Tharoor in his wife’s case and held a discussion on them among a panel of 10. Soon after, the Congress leader challenged Goswami to “prove his false claims” in court.
The Sunanda Pushkar case:
Pushkar’s death has been shrouded in mystery. She was found dead inside her suite at the five-star hotel in New Delhi on January 17, 2014. A Special Investigation Team of the Delhi Police is looking into what was earlier believed to have been a suicide.
In January 2015, the Delhi Police had registered a murder case after a board at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences had concluded that she had died of poisoning. The panel had later found that Pushkar had overdosed on an anti-anxiety drug.
This report reaffirmed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation’s conclusion that Pushkar had not died of poisoning from polonium or any other radioactive substance. A third medical panel has been unable to determine the substance that led to Pushkar’s death.
Tharoor has been questioned in the case a number of times, though he has maintained that he does not suspect foul play in his wife’s death and that she had died after overdosing on medication.
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