Jamaican police think it likely that Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was strangled by someone he knew after his team's defeat at cricket's World Cup showpiece, a senior officer told British radio Friday.
"It seems difficult to believe at this stage that it was a complete stranger," the deputy police commissioner in Kingston Mark Shields said in an interview with BBC Radio Live. "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."
Shields said that police were studying video recordings from the hotel's closed circuit television cameras but had not yet found anything suspicious.
Shields also "unequivocally dismissed" rumours that arrests had been made. "That's nonsense, as far as I'm concerned. There's actually no truth in that," he said.
In a press conference Thursday, Jamaican police spokesman Karl Angell confirmed Woolmer had been the victim of foul play. "The pathologist report states that Mr Woolmer's death was due to asphyxia as a result of manual strangulation," Angell said.
"In these circumstances, the matter of Mr Robert Woolmer's death is now being treated by the Jamaica police as a case of murder." Woolmer was declared dead in hospital Sunday after being found unconscious in his room. He was 58. The day before Pakistan - the 1992 World Cup winners - were knocked out of the 2007 version in the Caribbean.
"I don't want to talk about suspects at this stage," Shields said Thursday. He suggested more than one person may have been involved because he was a large man and probably difficult to subdue.
Pakistan team spokesman Pervez Mir meanwhile underlined 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 told BBC Radio Four.
"We went through the usual questioning by the police, which the police have done to all the other sides and all the guests at the hotel. The question never arose that the Pakistan team might be detained." David Morgan, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board and a director of the International Cricket Council (ICC), meanwhile voiced his grief at Woolmer's death.
"Cricket mourns Bob's passing and I mourn his passing on a personal basis. He was a very considerable force in the world of cricket," he told the BBC, adding he had no doubt Woolmer would want the World Cup to continue.
He declined to comment on speculation that Woolmer's murder could have been linked to alleged match-fixing, beyond saying that cricket was "a much cleaner game than it once was" thanks to the ICC's anti-corruption and security unit.
The ICC had "no evidence at all" of match-fixing activities on the pitch in recent months, he added. Meanwhile British police confirmed that they have 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.
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