AP News, June 8th, 2007
Jamaican police could face legal action for declaring Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer's death a homicide, the team's World Cup spokesman said Friday, claiming the high-profile case unfairly cast suspicion on the country's players.
"The name of Pakistan has been maligned and the names of Pakistani cricketers have been maligned because everybody became a suspect," spokesman Pervez Jamil Mir told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Pakistan.
Last month, a Jamaican newspaper reported that Scotland Yard investigators had concluded that Woolmer died of natural causes after his team's upset by Ireland on March 17 in the World Cup and was not strangled as local police had said.
Scotland Yard declined to comment on the report in the Jamaica Gleaner and said it would not discuss the toxicology tests that a British government lab conducted for Jamaican authorities.
Several media outlets have reported that Jamaican police will announce they believe the 58-year-old Woolmer died in his hotel room in Jamaica of natural causes. Jamaican Police Commissioner Lucius Thomas said Wednesday his office has new information in the case and will make an announcement in coming days, but refused to comment on the reports.
Woolmer's body was found in his Kingston hotel room March 18 and later pronounced dead at a hospital.
Three Pakistan team members, including squad captain Inzamam ul-Haq, were fingerprinted and swabbed for DNA as part of the investigation, though police said they were never officially suspects. But Mir said those actions along with repeated police statements that Woolmer was strangled fed speculation that Pakistan team members were somehow involved.
"I will be recommending whatever legal actions (the Pakistan Cricket Board) needs to take because basically it was the Pakistan team on trial," Mir said from Karachi, Pakistan.
