Cricket murder: Woolmer case police in dramatic swoop on Pakistan team hotel
From SHARON CHURCHER in Kingston and DENNIS RICE in Montego Bay
24th March 2007
Pakistan's cricket captain, manager and bowling coach were quizzed by Jamaican police investigating Bob Woolmer’s murder.
Skipper Inzamam-ul-Haq, manager Tarat Ali and ex-player Mushtaq Ahmed had just lunched with the squad at their hotel when police arrived unannounced to question them.
The move came three hours before the team was due to fly out of the West Indies. Inzamam had been preparing to leave the hotel when police appeared. He was seen walking with his luggage to reception.
Pakistan Captain Inzamam (right) at a memorial service for Bob Woolmer. The former England batsman was strangled in his hotel room in Jamaica hours after his side were defeated by minnows Ireland in the World Cup
But they were free to go after half an hour of questioning, in which Inzamam and Ali were asked why they had changed rooms at the hotel where team coach Woolmer died and Mushtaq was questioned over facial cuts. The three joined the Pakistan party that flew out to London last night.
The police move came after it was revealed that Jamaican detectives are investigating reports that hours before he died, Woolmer was involved in a furious row with members of his squad on the team bus shortly after the side’s humiliating World Cup defeat by Ireland last Saturday.
The disclosure comes amid growing speculation that Woolmer, 58, was killed to prevent him revealing details of the activities of mafia betting syndicates.
Team media manager Pervez Jamil Mir said: ‘Police asked Inzamam two questions specifically. The first was why he had changed his room from the 12th floor (where Woolmer was murdered) to the fifth floor. Inzamam had made the change before the attack on Bob and he explained that he did it because he wanted to be nearer to the other players on the fifth floor. ‘The second question was what time he had gone to bed. But I don’t know what his answer was to that.
‘Mr Ali was asked why he had changed his room. He said that he had been on the 12th floor but had moved to the Trelawney suite on either the 15th or 17th floor and checked in under the name of Newman. When I asked him “Why”, he said it was because after what had happened to Bob he was scared. We were all scared.’
Mr Mir said that Mushtaq had simply been asked questions about his movements last Saturday. ‘He was also asked about cuts to his face but these were injuries he sustained during practice at Sabina Park in Jamaica on the morning of the Ireland match,’ said Mr Mir.
Two Jamaican police officers who were on the bus during Woolmer’s alleged row with squad members have been interviewed.
A senior official from the International Cricket Council (ICC) anti-corruption unit has flown to the island to investigate.
A Jamaican police source told The Mail on Sunday last night: ‘When Mr Woolmer boarded the coach to go back to the hotel, he was very, very angry. Our investigators are looking into a report that he confronted some members of the touring party on the bus. They did not perform up to standard and he vented his dIsgust verbally.’
Woolmer was found dead in his room at the Pegasus hotel on Sunday morning. The 6ft 1in former England all-rounder had been strangled with such force that a bone in his neck had broken. The walls of his bathroom were sprayed with his blood and vomit. ICC officials say there was no breach of security on the hotel floor where Woolmer and the rest of the Pakistan team were staying – indicating that the killer was known to Woolmer.
Last night, one of Woolmer’s closest friends said he had ‘absolutely no doubt’ that he had been murdered on the instructions of a match-fixing syndicate. South African Clive Rice, who was coach at Nottinghamshire when Woolmer was in charge at Warwickshire, said Woolmer knew exactly who had been involved in some of cricket’s biggest scandals.
Rice said that during a game in England in 1999, Woolmer gave him the names of senior cricket officials secretly involved in some of the earlier fixing incidents.
Woolmer was coach of South Africa when their captain, Hansie Cronje, was convicted of match-fixing.
Five years ago Cronje died in a mystery plane crash which Rice insists was also murder. ‘Bob told me a lot that never came out,’ said Rice. ‘I’m not just talking about other players being involved, but officials too.’
Mark Shields, the former Scotland Yard high-flier in charge of the Jamaican police investigation, said initial DNA tests and fingerprinting had been confined to Pakistani players and management, despite the presence of at least 300 other guests and scores of staff at the hotel where Woolmer died. Pakistan’s cricket chief, Naseem Ashraf, has insisted that his players were ‘no more suspect than anyone else in that hotel’.
But Deputy Police Commissioner Shields said: ‘The only people to have been tested are in that party. Mr Woolmer was totally naked when he was found and he wouldn’t have opened the door to someone unless he knew them. There was no forced entry to his room.
‘That is not to say his attacker may not have been a stranger. We, however, are logically starting from the inside before spreading the investigation outwards. Other people in the vicinity of the hotel will be tested in time.’ Further vital clues might have been provided by two police officers who were supposed to be on duty on the 12th floor of the Pegasus hotel. The team later moved from there to the Ritz Carlton. Police sources have claimed that the officers were away from their posts when Woolmer was strangled some time in the early hours of last Sunday.
Shields refused to comment. But he disclosed that investigators suspect drugs secreted in the former Kent player’s last room-service dinner were used to subdue him.
Shields said: ‘He was a big man and unless he was drugged or impaired it would perhaps have been difficult to restrain him. We are looking at whether his food was drugged.
‘The meal was thrown away after he put the tray outside his room but we are conducting toxicology and tissue tests.’
Woolmer was staying in Room 375 at the Pegasus, feet away from West Indies captain Brian Lara, and spent his last hours taking room service and sending emails.
In a message sent to wife Gill in South Africa at 3am he said his team’s loss to Ireland had been ‘devastating’. He was killed shortly afterwards. The door had not been prised open and police found no sign of a struggle.
Jamaica is renowned for high levels of violence but any criminals would have been caught on camera the instant they walked into the hotel lobby. Woolmer’s body, which had been moved from the blood-splattered bathroom to the lounge, was discovered by a cleaner at 10am.
Mr Mir described a harrowing scene, with Woolmer slumped between the toilet and door. ‘There was vomit on the walls and blood and diarrhoea in the toilet,’ he said. Nausea and diarrhoea are symptomatic of chloroform poisoning.
Friends said Woolmer had grown increasingly irritated with the ‘inconsistent and mysterious’ behaviour of his squad. In the months leading up to the World Cup, several team meetings were held without him.
Jamaica has no extradition treaty with Pakistan but Shields stressed that they had been given no reason to suspect anything less than full co-operation.
In a sign that arrests may be pending, police revealed that two Pakistani officials were on the way to Jamaica from the US to liaise with police.
There was mounting anger on the streets of Kingston last night over the prospect that witnesses were being allowed to leave in the middle of an investigation that has cast a shadow over the World Cup.
Last night Mr Mir denied there had been any ‘heated words’ between Woolmer and his players after their defeat to Ireland. He also gave some clue to the mounting tension between his countrymen and Jamaican police when he complained that they had still not been formally told the cause of death.
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