Woolmer 'poisoned'
Published on : 30/04/2007
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Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer was poisoned before being strangled to death, the BBC reports.
Tonight's BBC1 Panorama documentary will claim that the cricket coach was left incapacitated before being fatally strangled.
Woolmer, 58, was found dead in his hotel room in Kingston, Jamaica, on March 18th – the day after his team were knocked out of the cricket World Cup.
The inquest into the former English cricketer's murder was suspended on April 20th after Jamaican authorities told the coroner that there were significant developments in the case.
However Woolmer's body was finally returned to his home in Cape Town, South Africa, on Sunday.
"It now seems certain that as he was being strangled, he'd already been rendered helpless - leaving him unable to fight back," Adam Parson, Panorama journalist, said.
"The specific details of that poison are now very likely to offer a significant lead to finding his murderer."
The claim that Woolmer was poisoned before being strangled also appears to carry some weight with those investigating his murder.
Mark Shields, the policeman leading the investigation, told Panorama "a lot of force" would be needed for one man to strangle another person.
"Bob Woolmer was a large man and that's why one could argue that it was an extremely strong person or maybe more than one person," he told the programme makers.
"But equally the lack of external injuries suggests that there might be some other factors and that's what we're looking into at the moment."
