The alleged murder of Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, revealed by forensic study by AIMS, throws a lot of questions.
At the time of the incident,information surfaced that two foreign nationals on forged passports traveled to Dubai on the night of the murder.
Nothing more was heard of despite suspicions that the murder looked Mafia Style.
Now nearly after a year, with a change in the Government, the enquiry hotted up with suspicions about Tharoor’s alleged extra marital affair with a Pakistan journalist , Meher.
The deposition of the Tharoor household that he heard Sunannda speaking to some one on the day of her murder that she would reveal everything to Media and Shashi Tharoor is finished.
There is also the suspicion that, considering the Shashi Tharoor IPL connection might have been one of the reasons for the murder.
Dr.Subramanian Swamy alleges that IPL was used to launder Oil for Food scam involving Iraq and Sunnanda was about to divulge the information linking Sonia Gandhi to IPL money laundering, Oil for scam.
It may be noted that Natwar Singh, former Union Minister of the Congress also stated that Sonia Gandhi was involved in the Oil for Food fraud in which former UN Chief Kofi Annan’s son was indicted.
” Journalist Nalini Singh told TOI on Thursday that Shashi Tharoor’s wife, Sunanda Pushkar, had spoken to her about some IPL issue which she claims she could not comprehend. She said Sunanda had brought it up during the phone conversation the two had on the intervening night of January 16 and 17. Sunanda was found dead on January 17.
“I don’t remember what exactly she said. I can recall she had said something like “look at this IPL mess also and that I also took on the IPL thing’,” Singh said.”
Interestingly, Subramanian Swamy has been alleging that Sunanda was murdered as she wanted to expose the IPL muck and money laundering being carried out through it. He has even dragged a member of the Gandhi family into the controversy.
“Dr. Subramaniam Swamy has said Congress lawmaker Dr. Shashi Tharoor must be thoroughly investigated in the murder of his wife Sunanda Puskhar Tharoor.
“I am a 100 percent certain that Tharoor did not murder his wife, but I am a 100 percent sure that he was aware of it and facilitated it, ” he told The News Minute (TNM) in an interview conducted over the telephone. “This has been done because what Sunanda was to reveal points to Sonia Gandhi,” he added.
Asked what was the nature of this evidence and he said there are two issues. “One is the money laundering through IPL which involves Robert Vadra and the other is the oil-for food stamps -Sonia Gandhi is the common link,” he said. The Indian Premier league (IPL) is a cricket tournament in India and the oil- for-food refers to the United Nations’ (UN) arrangement with Saddam Hussain’s Iraq to povide essential foods in exchange for oil. The UN provided food stamps, not cash, to Iraq as money to buy food for its people.”
According to Swamy, Sunanda Pushkar had told friends that the food stamps distributed in Iraq and written in Arabic had Sonia Gandhi’s name on them. Sunanda Tharoor had told her friends that Tharoor had bragged that because of the evidence he had, he was untouchable.
India and Iraq shared a close relationship at that time and Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral was among few world leaders who travelled to Baghdad to show his solidarity towards the Iraqi people. It maybe recalled that former foreign minister Natwar Singh resigned following the Volker committee report saying he had been made a scapegoat to protect other people. The oil-for-food also involved the family of the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan whose son Kojo Annan was working for a Switzerland based company named Cotecna Inspection Services S.A which from 1998-2003 had a contract with the UN to monitor food arriving in Iraq under the oil-for-food programme. There was no direct evidence linking Kojo Annan to the payments, but he received money from Cotecna long after he had stopped working for them. Shashi Tharoor was Kofi Annan’s right hand man ever since the two met in Geneva in the early eighties.
“She was not on Alprax. Medical reports say that. Tharoor is on Alprax and he will break down if he is interrogated – this is what the Congress Party is afraid of,” Dr. Swamy said. ..
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One of the earliest allegations of wrongdoing in the programme surfaced on 25 January 2004, when al Mada, a daily newspaper in Iraq, published a list of individuals and organizations alleged to have received oil sales contracts via the UN’s Oil-for-Food Programme. The list came from over 15,000 documents which were reportedly found in the state-owned Iraqi oil corporation, which had close links to the Iraqi Oil Ministry.
Named in the list of beneficiaries were British MP George Galloway and his charity, the Mariam Fund; former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua; and Shaker al-Kaffaji, an Iraqi-American businessman, India’s foreign minister, Natwar Singh, was removed from office because of his role in the scandal. Many prominent Russian firms and individuals were also included on the al Mada list. Even the Russian Orthodox Church was supposedly involved in illegal oil trading. The former assistant to the Vatican secretary of state, Reverend Jean-Marie Benjamin, is said to have received rights to sell 4.5 million barrels (720,000 m3). George Galloway subsequently won two libel actions against the Christian Science Monitor and Daily Telegraph, which reported the allegations.
Citation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-for-Food_Programme#al_Mada_list
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