Texts, emails retrieved from Sunanda's phone

Delhi Police have received a report from the forensic department which had been asked to check the contents of mobile phones and laptops belonging to Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who was found dead under mysterious circumstances at a hotel in Delhi last year.

It has emerged that a few items, mostly mails and messages, were deleted from these gadgets around the same day Pushkar was found dead.

The forensic department has retrieved them and they are now set to be analysed by police.

“We will analyse the deleted information and see whether it was deleted as a routine process or it was done with a malafide intention,” Delhi Police Commissioner B S Bassi told reporters on Monday.

Four mobile phones and two laptops had been handed over to Gandhinagar-based Directorate of Forensic Science on January 20, three days after her death.
The DFS submitted its report to police last week, said Bassi.

“We had sent certain equipment for retrieval of data from the forensic science lab. They retrieved the data and sent the equipment along with a detail report back to us. It is currently being examined. If something of interest comes up after the examination and if there is a need to clarify it from any person, we will do it,” said Bassi.

He said it was “volumes of data” and it will take time to analyse. Meanwhile, despite the special investigating team in the case sending reminders to some social media giants to share some desired information, they have not been obliged.

“We will ask Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry to expedite the process and provide us the information that we had sought from them,” said Bassi.

Police are also waiting for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to send a report on the nature of poison which killed Pushkar.

The viscera samples were sent to the US after AIIMS said Indian labs lacked facility to identify the poison which caused her death.

Meanwhile, Tharoor told a news agency on Monday that he is awaiting justice in the case.

“There is no evidence as such on the murder so far, thats why entire family members, brother & son are with me (sic),” the agency quoted him as saying.

Pushkar was found dead at a Leela Hotel room on January 17 last year. Police have registered a murder case.

Tharoor has already been questioned thrice.