Shashi Tharoor should already be in custodial interrogation: Swamy

A day after he wrote to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh demanding a court-monitored SIT to take forward the probe into the mysterious death of Sunanda Pushkar, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy on Sunday asserted that Congress leader Shashi Tharoor should have been taken into custodial interrogation by now, adding it showed the snail pace of the entire probe.

"I have been in touch with Rajnath ji since July 2014 and whatever forward movement has taken place so far, it's because he has been taking precaution to see that no political interference takes place. He has told the Police Commissioner not to allow any politician to intervene, as it could block the progress of the investigation," Swamy told ANI.

Stressing that there has been no progress in the case since the FBI report in January, Swamy added that the main factor to be noted was that Tharoor, Sunanda's husband, has been giving contradictory statements to the police.

"He is the principal person, who was witness to whether she was dead or alive. He is the husband and there are many such situations that he has to explain. He should have by now been taken into custodial interrogation or be made to take a lie detector test or a narco test but nothing has happened," Swamy said.

He further said that there is no accused in the case even though it was a murder and warned that the evidences would go cold if the police delays the probe into the matter.

Adding that it will be appropriate if the case was subjected to a court monitored SIT, the BJP leader asserted that he would ensure the investigation is speedily completed.

"The murder happened in January 2014 and we still don't have a clue in 2016...that cannot go on," Swamy said.

The BJP leader, who has been crying foul over Sunanda's death of Pushkar, had earlier alleged that the wife of the Congress leader was killed in a professional way.

Sunanda was found dead inside her suite at a five-star hotel here in January 2014, a day after she was involved in a spat with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar on Twitter over the latter's alleged affair with Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram.

Her viscera samples were sent to the FBI lab in Washington DC in February last year to determine the kind of poison that killed her after an AIIMS medical board identified poisoning as the reason behind her death.

The FBI had endorsed the AIIMS report on poisoning and also said that a "dangerous chemical" was present in her body that may have killed her.

Swamy had earlier written two letters - one in July 2014 and another in December 2014 - to the Home Minister in this regard.