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KINGSTON (Jamaica), March 23: Pakistan’s coach Bob Woolmer was strangled in his hotel room and probably knew his killer, Jamaican police said on Friday, in a crime that has rocked the World Cup and sent shockwaves around the cricket world.
The International Cricket Council insisted the World Cup would go on after police confirmed Woolmer was murdered, amid swirling rumours of possible links to match-fixing gangs that have flourished in the game’s dark underbelly.
The police took DNA samples from all members of the Pakistan team following the murder confirmation. A spokesman for the team appealed to the authorities to allow the players to leave the Caribbean on Friday — a day earlier than scheduled — as ‘the boys want to get away from the tension and grimness’.
Pakistan’s players gave statements to police and were fingerprinted on Thursday before leaving for Montego Bay, where they were to stay for two days before returning home.
Woolmer, 58, was found unconscious in his hotel room on Sunday and declared dead in hospital, a day after Pakistan’s shock defeat to minnows Ireland saw the 1992 World Cup winners crash out of this year’s competition.
“It seems difficult to believe at this stage it was a complete stranger,” Jamaica’s deputy police commissioner Mark Shields told BBC radio in London. “It is imperative that we keep an open mind but I have to say at this stage it looks as if it may be somebody somehow linked to him, because clearly he let somebody into his hotel room and it may be that he knew who that person was.”
He said that police were probing video recordings from the hotel’s closed circuit television cameras, but had yet to find anything suspicious.
Mr Shields also ‘unequivocally’ dismissed rumours that arrests had been made. “That's nonsense, as far as I’m concerned.”
Jamaican police spokesman Karl Angell told a press conference on Thursday that Woolmer had been the victim of foul play.
“The pathologist’s report states that Mr Woolmer’s death was due to asphyxia as a result of manual strangulation,” Mr Angell said.
Shields, the police commissioner, suggested more than one person may have been involved and said there were no signs of forced entry into Woolmer’s room. “Bob was a large man and therefore it would have taken some significant force to subdue him and cause strangulation, but we do not know at this stage how many people were in the room,” he said.
There were calls for the World Cup to be called off, but ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed said the game of cricket ‘cannot be put off by a cowardly criminal act’. “The best way to do that is for the teams that remain in the tournament to play out a great World Cup, something that will help put the smile back on the face of our great sport,” he said in a statement.
MATCH-FIXING: There was speculation that the murder was carried out by criminals keen to avoid exposure in claims of match-fixing which may have arisen in a book Bob Woolmer was planning to write.
Pakistan team’s spokesman P.J. Mir dismissed such suggestions as ‘totally baseless and premature’. He also stressed that there was no question of the Pakistan team having been detained or prevented from leaving Jamaica. “It has never been the case that we have been detained or will be detained or anything of that sort,” he said.
Woolmer, who played Tests for England, was coach of South Africa when its former captain Hansie Cronje was bought off by bookmakers in 1996. Asked if the team had discussed such a possibility, Mr Mir said: “Absolutely not. The players, as far as I know, have not spoken about any match-fixing or any match-fixing incident because there is no question of that.”
In Lahore, former fast bowler Sarfaraz Nawaz said Woolmer had fallen victim to a ‘gambling mafia’. “Nothing was stolen from Woolmer’s (room) except for his diary and papers,” he said.
“I am not sure about his laptop. But the diary and the papers could only be of interest to bookie mafia.”
Woolmer became Pakistan’s coach in 2004 and had talked of the stresses of managing one of the most volatile teams in world cricket.
Meanwhile, the British police confirmed that they had volunteered to help with the investigation, and retired Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Condon is on standby to go to Jamaica. Lord Condon was commissioned by the ICC to write a report into cricketing corruption in 2001.—Agencies
