The Goa Police said CCTV footage from Curlies Restaurant established that Sonali Phogat’s manager Sudhir Sangwan and his associate Sukhwinder Singh forcibly made the actor drink an “obnoxious” chemical substance after which she was visibly unstable.
Sonali Phogat’s brother says satisfied with probe amid lens on Goa shack footage
BJP leader and actor Sonali Phogat’s brother Rinku Dhaka said on Friday that their family is “satisfied” with how the investigation into her death is progressing. He said the family will now look at ways to ensure justice for the late social media star who was cremated at her hometown in Haryana’s Hisar after her body reached the region earlier in the day.
“The CCTV footage has revealed the truth. We cremated my sister today, [we] will look into the process further to get her justice now,” he was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.
Phogat’s brother-in-law Kuldeep Phogat said that the family has been insisting she got murdered since the beginning. “She was healthy, had no illnesses. Sudhir Sangwan drugged her. She called us, said something was mixed in her food. She was scared. This was the night of her murder,” he added.
The Goa Police said that CCTV footage from Curlies Restaurant in Anjuna established Phogat’s manager Sudhir Sangwan and his associate Sukhwinder Singh forcibly made the actor drink an “obnoxious” chemical substance after which she was visibly unstable.
“We do not know what is the obnoxious chemical that was mixed in the drink that was forcibly given to her but it is a synthetic drug. Until (there is) chemical analysis, we cannot say for sure,” inspector general of police Omvir Singh Bishnoi told reporters.
The duo confessed to making Phogat drink the substance during interrogation, police said. The men were arrested and produced before a judge, who remanded them in police custody for two days.
On Thursday, Phogat’s post-mortem report said there were multiple blunt force injuries on her body. However, Bishnoi said earlier that those were only minor bruises, and were not the cause of her death. Initially, police and medical reports had said Phogat seemed to have had a heart attack leading to her death
The Goa Police lodged a murder case pertaining to Phogat’s death on Thursday after her brother filed an FIR alleging it was a “preplanned murder”. The BJP leader’s sisters along with Dhaka have been said their sibling was murdered, and have called Sangwan and Singh as the culprits since the incident came to light.
Meanwhile, Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar has said that the state government can consider a CBI probe into Phogat’s death if her family demands the same in writing.
