KARACHI, Pakistan -- The probe into the death of Pakistan's
cricket coach, who was found dead in his room in a hotel in
Jamaica, is "inconclusive" and has not proved that he was
murdered, a Pakistani investigator said Monday.
The comments by Mir Zubair Mahmood, a senior Karachi detective
who was sent to Jamaica to help the investigation into Bob
Woolmer's death, casts doubt over earlier assertions by police
there that the coach was murdered.
Jamaican police have said that Woolmer was found strangled in
his room in an upscale hotel in Kingston on March 18, a day after
his Pakistan squad was eliminated from the World Cup by Ireland in
an upset defeat.
But Mahmood said that the cause of the coach's death has yet to
be determined.
"No one can say that it was a murder or a natural death,"
Mahmood told The Associated Press. "Several tests have been sent
to Scotland Yard and the results are awaited and the most I can say
(is) that the investigation in Bob Woolmer's case is
inconclusive."
Mahmood is a respected detective who was involved in the probe
into the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who
was kidnapped and beheaded in Karachi in 2002.
A senior Jamaican investigator said last week that police there
are trying to identify dozens of people captured by security
cameras at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel, where Woolmer, a 58-year-old
Englishman, was found dead.
About 80 unidentified people were filmed on Woolmer's floor
during the days he and his team stayed at the hotel, Deputy Police
Commissioner Mark Shields told AP last week.
Police have made no arrests.
The Sunday Times newspaper in Britain cited a source close to
Jamaican police as saying Woolmer had ingested enough herbicide to
kill him. That followed a report from the British Broadcasting
Corp. that a toxicology test on Woolmer's body showed the presence
of a drug that would have incapacitated him.