Sunanda sent mail to Tharoor saying she had no ‘desire to live’: Delhi Police to court
“I have no desire to live...all I pray for is death.” This is what Sunanda Pushkar wrote in an e-mail to her husband Shashi Tharoor nine days before she was found dead in a luxury hotel room here, police on Monday told a city court.
The police also said that Sunanda’s death was due to poisoning and 27 tablets of Alprax were found in her room but it was not clear how many pills she had consumed.
While quoting from the charge sheet, the Delhi Police told Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal that Sunanda had injuries on her body which were received prior to her death which is reflected in the postmortem report. In an e-mail sent to Tharoor on January 8, 2014, she had written, “I don’t care about the test. I have no desire to live...all I pray for is death,” the police claimed. Sunanda’s mail and messages on social media should be taken as a “dying declaration”, the police told the court, which today reserved for June 5 its order on whether to summon Tharoor as an accused in the case.
Referring to Section 113A of the Indian Evidence Act, Special Public Prosecutor Atul Shrivastava said, “It is presumed that if she has committed suicide, she must have been subjected to cruelty before death. Court may take cognisance of this fact that it is a case of abetment, as the death has taken place within seven years of the marriage, and under the law, a case of abetment is made out.”
Under Section 113A of the Act, a court “may presume, having regard to all the other circumstances of the case, that ... suicide had been abetted by her husband or by such relative of her husband” if she kills herself within seven years from the date of her marriage. To drive home the point that Pushkar was subjected to cruelty, he also alleged that Tharoor did not bother to take care of his ailing wife who was suffering from high fever. He said that Pushkar used to write poems, the contents of which showed that everything was not right with her.
Delhi Police had on May 14 accused the Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram of abetting Pushkar’s suicide and urged the court that he should be summoned as an accused in the four-and-half year-old case, claiming there was sufficient evidence against him.