Swamy accuses Delhi police chief of concealing facts in Sunanda Pushkar's FBI report

New Delhi: Asserting that Congress leader Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar was poisoned to death, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy on Saturday accused Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi of not revealing the exact chemical compound that was responsible for her death.

"Police Commissioner is not telling the media that the FBI found the presence of heart arrest injectable poison lidocaine in Sunanda body," Swamy tweeted.

The Delhi police on Friday reaffirmed that the death of Sunanda Pushkar was “not natural”, as evident from the final report by an AIIMS medical board after analysing the FBI’s findings on her viscera samples.

Confusion prevailed over the nature of poisoning at this juncture as Delhi police commissioner BS Bassi ruled out the presence of any “radioactive substance” in Sunanda’s body while Sudhir Gupta, head of the AIIMS forensic science department, claimed that the FBI “has not ruled out completely the presence of radioactive substances in the viscera samples”. While it has been established that Sunanda died of poisoning, the authorities, and the police in particular, are yet to reveal the nature of the poison.

According to the AIIMS Panel, which is headed by Dr. Sudhir Gupta, the head of the Department of Forensics, Pushkar died after being poisoned by Polonimum-210 or Po-210, sources state.

The Delhi Police had submitted a 15-page Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report to AIIMS Medical Board for further opinion.

Sunanda Pushkar, 51, was found dead at the Leela Hotel in New Delhi in January 2014.

Pushkar's viscera samples were sent to the FBI lab in Washington in February last year after a panel of doctors from AIIMS said that the alleged 'poison' could not be detected in Indian labs.