SUNANDA CASE: DESEAL SUITE, ORDERS COURT

COURT ORDER No headway in case; Leela Palace says it had incurred a loss of ₹50 lakh

NEWDELHI: A Delhi court on Friday ordered de-sealing of suite number 345 of Hotel Leela Palace, where Sunanda Pushkar — wife of Congress politician Shashi Tharoor — was found dead in 2014.

The suite has been lying sealed since January 17, 2014. The court said that the hotel cannot be made to suffer continuously and the suite cannot be locked forever for investigation.

“The hotel cannot be put to unending hardshi p and loss due to lethargy on part of the investigating team,” said metropolitan magistrate Pankaj Sharma, ordering to de-seal the suite within four weeks from Friday.

The hotel management had approached the court with a plea that the suite be de-sealed because not a single probe body visited it in the last one year.

The court said that the police have not given any reasonable ground for keeping the suite locked.

It also noted that police have not been able to reach a definite conclusion regarding the cause of Pushkar’s death.

In its plea, the hotel had said that their inability to offer the suite, which costs ₹55,000 to ₹61,000 per night, to clients has cost them nearly half-a-crore rupees in the last three years. The locked suite has become a home for bugs and insects, it said.

The court said that the hotel’s apprehension that the continuous locking of the suite is going to create sanitary and cleanliness issues is reasonable.

Meanwhile, the court has directed the hotel to allow the police to collect articles lying in the suite for investigation. It also directed the police to file a compliance report by August 19 and granted them liberty to file application seeking more time for probe, if they were unable to conclude the probe within the time.

Pushkar’s death has been controversial and the Delhi Police have come under criticism for the manner in which they handled the case.

Though senior police officials, including the then joint commissioner of police Vivek Gogia and deputy commissioner of police BS Jaiswal, had inspected the room, they failed to mention crucial details such as the presence of broken glasses.

Anti-depressant Alprax tablets were found two days after the senior officers inspected the room. Though police suspected poisoning to be a reason for Pushkar’s death, food samples were collected only after 11 months.

The hotel cannot be put to unending hardship and loss due to lethargy on part of the investigating team.

PANKAJ SHARMA, metropolitan magistrate