The Goa Police on Friday alleged that Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sonali Phogat was drugged at a party by the two persons accused in her murder case, ANI reported.
Phogat was brought dead to a hospital in North Goa on Monday. The police had initially said that she appeared to have suffered a heart attack.
However, on Wednesday, Phogat’s brother Rinku Dhaka filed a complaint accusing her personal assistant Sudhir Sangwan and his aide Sukhvinder Singh of killing the BJP leader. On Thursday, the police filed a murder case.
Inspector General of Police Omvir Singh Bishnoi said that Sangwan and Singh confessed to having mixed an “obnoxious chemical” into a liquid and made Phogat drink it.
“On the basis of CCTV footage, it was seen that accused Sudhir Sangwan and his associate Sukhwinder Singh were partying with the deceased at a club,” Bishnoi told reporters. “A video establishes that one of them forcefully made the victim consume a substance.”
The incident took place at Curlies Restaurant at Anjuna in North Goa district between the night of August 22 and early hours of August 23. Sagwan and Singh confessed during questioning that they had intentionally mixed the substance in her drinks, Bishnoi added.
The police official said that at 4.30 am, when Phogat was not in control of herself, the accused persons took her to a toilet, India Today reported. “...There is no explanation of what they did for two hours,” he said.
Bishnoi said that the accused persons have been arrested and will be produced before a court soon.
“Expert of FSL [forensic science laboratory] has been called,” he said. “For further interrogation, accused will be sent with a team to various locations to get further evidence.”
While the doctor who conducted the postmortem had reserved his opinion on the cause of her death pending chemical analysis, he had written that “multiple blunt force injuries” were found on Phogat’s body.
On Friday, Bishnoi said that those injuries could be abrasions that Phogat sustained while she was being taken to the hospital, PTI reported.
The police officer added that since the post-mortem report has not mentioned the exact cause of death, it can be known only after chemical examination of large internal organs of the body and histopathological and serological reports are available.
In his complaint, Phogat’s brother, Rinku Dhaka, said that the BJP leader had told the family that she would visit Chandigarh from her hometown of Hisar, but visiting Goa was not part of her plan. He alleged that Phogat’s associates planned her murder.
Dhaka claimed that Phogat had found out that Sangwan stole Rs 40 lakh from her Hisar home. Phogat was supposed to file a complaint against Sangwan after returning from her trip, Dhaka claimed in the complaint.
The BJP leader rose to fame with her videos on the TikTok app. She had joined the BJP in 2008.
In 2019, she contested the Haryana Assembly elections from Adampur constituency and lost to Kuldeep Bishnoi, who was a Congress leader then. In 2020, Phogat was a participant of reality show Bigg Boss.
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