Deepening the mystery behind the alleged murder of Sunanda Pushkar, a two-month-old letter from her husband and MP Shashi Tharoor, in which he accuses the Delhi Police of trying to frame him, surfaced on Wednesday.

In the letter to Delhi Police Commissioner B.S. Bassi on November 12, Mr. Tharoor said a police officer had repeatedly assaulted one of his servants to intimidate him into giving a statement that that the two of them had murdered Ms. Pushkar.

In another development, Sudhir K. Gupta, Professor and Head of Forensic Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, who headed the panel which conducted the post-mortem on Sunanda, said he had never recommended that it was a homicide. “All we have said is that the cause of death is poison,” he said. “The three-member panel which conducted the post-mortem did not mention ‘homicide’ in its findings and it found ‘poisoning’ as the cause of her death.” It was on the basis of the AIIMS forensic team’s report that a case of murder was registered. Mr. Tharoor’s letter documents the conversation between him and Mr. Bassi on November 8 following two sessions of interrogation of the domestic help Shri Narayan Singh.

“I was therefore shocked and appalled to learn that in the course of the 16-hour interrogation conducted by four Delhi Police officers on November 7 and again during the 14-hour interrogation on November 8, my domestic help Narayan Singh was repeatedly physically assaulted by one of your officers,” he says in the letter.

“Worse, the officer used the traumatic physical assault to try and intimidate Narayan into ‘confessing’ that he and I murdered my wife.”

Without identifying the officer in the letter, Mr. Tharoor demanded action against him/her.