Sunanda had expressed desire to die, cops tell court

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New Delhi: “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 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 post-mortem report. In an e-mail sent to Tharoor 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 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. In a nearly 3,000-page charge sheet, the police named Tharoor as the only accused while also alleging that he had subjected his wife to cruelty.