Bob may have been poisoned with weedkiller

LONDON: Bob Woolmer may have been poisoned with a rare "weedkiller", traces of which were found on his champagne glass, British media claimed on Sunday.

British daily 'Sunday Times' quoted sources close to the Jamaica police as saying that high concentrations of a herbicide were discovered in the murdered Pakistan cricket
coach's stomach and traces were found on the inside and outside of a glass from which he had been drinking champagne.

"Everything was contaminated. The stomach content, the glass, everything. There was enough to kill him," a source said.

The weedkiller is so rare that the police have yet to establish whether it is available in Jamaica and they are focusing on two bottles of champagne gifted to him. One had
been emptied and the other was left untouched.

"We think it's something very unusual, that you can't even buy in Jamaica. We don't know what form it was in, whether liquid or crystal.

"The weedkiller was certainly in the glass. We are not sure whether it was in the bottle. Until we get further results we can't confirm it," the source added.

It is not known whether he shared the bottle of champagne with another person, the paper said.

58-year-old Woolmer, who has been cremated in Cape Town last week, had died in his Jamaica Pegasus hotel room on March 18, hours after Pakistan had been knocked out of the World Cup following their defeat to minnows Ireland.

Pervez Mir, who was the spokesman of the Pakistan cricket team for the World Cup, confirmed Woolmer had received the champagne.

"I was told that somebody has brought two bottles," he said but added that the coach was not particularly fond of champagne.

"He (Woolmer) told me he was mostly a beer drinker because he was diabetic and it suited his blood sugar," Mir said.

Meanwhile, toxicologists say there are hundreds of weedkiller compounds that could be used as poison. Some have no smell or taste, are soluble in water and can cause an acute reaction within hours.

One expert from Guy's hospital poisons unit in London said such compounds were usually ingested accidentally or by people committing suicide.

"The use of a herbicide in homicide is pretty rare if not totally exclusive to this case," the expert said.

Mark Shields, the deputy police commissioner leading the investigation, will this week travel to Britain to meet a team of experts carrying out further toxicology tests and reviewing the postmortem.