Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi said on Monday that they have received a report from Gandhinagar-based Directorate of Forensic Science Services (DFSS), which was tasked to check the contents of Sunanda Pushkar’s laptops and mobile phones and it is being analysed in detail to see if anything was deleted from the gadgets to destroy evidence.
With the DFSS report in hand, Delhi Police SIT — probing the mysterious death of Pushkar — will again bear down on Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry to share data related to her social media accounts and the people she was in touch with. On January 20, the Delhi Police had handed over two laptops and four mobile phones to Gujarat DFSS to retrieve the data.
“We had sent certain equipments for retrieval of data from the forensic science lab; they have retrieved the data and sent the equipment and a detailed report back to us,” Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi said.
“A week back, we had received these equipments and reports, now we are analysing the data. It is volumes of data and it will take time to study it,” he added. The Special Investigating Team (SIT) has not received the desired information sought so far from social media giants like Twitter and Facebook, among others.
“We will ask Twitter, FB and Blackberry to expedite the process and provide us the information that we had sought from them. We will analyse the deleted information and see whether it was deleted as a routine process or was it done with malafide intention,” said Bassi.
Delhi Police is also waiting for the United States FBI to send their report on the kind of poison which caused Pushkar’s death. Investigators had sent the viscera samples to the US after AIIMS doctors had said that Indian labs lacked facility to identify the poison, which caused her death.
The cause of death, termed “poisoning” by a panel of AIIMS doctors, has remained the biggest mystery of the case as they could not specify the kind of poison and the way it reached Pushkar’s body. A day before Pushkar was found dead in a luxury hotel here in January last year, she apparently had a spat with Tarar on microblogging website Twitter over the latter’s alleged affair with Tharoor.
Tharoor was questioned by the investigators thrice last month that were focused on the IPl controversy, which broke in early 2010 when he was the Minister of State for External Affairs. Sunanda (52) was found dead in her suite at a five-star hotel in South Delhi on the night of January 17 last year.