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Sonali Phogat death: CBI team visits Curlies’ nightclub
A four-member team of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrived in Goa on Friday and formally took over the Sonal Phogat death case from the Goa police
A team of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) that has taken over the probe into the death of actor and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sonali Phogat visited the now shuttered Curlies’ beach shack and nightclub on Sunday where Phogat was last seen partying the night she died.
The team which has been camping in Goa for three days now, arrived at the south Anjuna beach and visited the shack, more than two thirds of which is now demolished following orders from the National Green Tribunal, for being in violation of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification.
On Saturday the team spent over 10 hours at the Grand Leoney Resort, where Sonali Phogat and the two persons accused of murdering her -- her manager Sudhir Sangwan and his associate Sukhwinder Singh -- were staying and seized some material from the two rooms -- one in which Sonali Phogat was staying and the other in which Sangwan and Singh were said to be staying in.
Also Read | New video shows BJP’s Sonali Phogat, who died in Goa, being forced to drink
The four-member team of CBI arrived in Goa on Friday and formally took over the case from the Goa police.
“We have received an intimation from CBI to hand over the case and we have handed over the case. All the case files, the records have been handed over,” said North Goa superintendent of police (SP) Shobit Saksena.
CBI officials offered no comments to the media who were outside the nightclub as well as the hotel on Saturday.
CBI is yet to take custody of the accused or interrogate them in the case.
The BJP leader was brought dead to the St Anthony’s Hospital at Anjuna in the wee hours of August 23 after she spent the previous night at Curlies’ beach shack, a beachfront nightclub, where she was allegedly drugged with methamphetamine (MDMA) by Sudhir Sangwan and Sukhwinder, the two persons who accompanied her to the club.
While the case was initially registered as an unnatural death and was initially reported as a heart attack, it was upgraded to murder after the post mortem report revealed several blunt force injuries all over her body. A subsequent investigation revealed that Sangwan laced Phogat’s drink with MDMA causing her to be visibly unstable. After spending nearly two hours in the toilet of the club, where she was vomiting continuously, she was seen staggering out of the club at around 4.30am.
Sangwan and Singh were arrested the following day and have now been sent to judicial custody after spending 14 days in police custody. A team from the Goa police visited Haryana to verify her family’s allegations that she was murdered for financial gain.
The Goa police has so far arrested five people. Sudhir Sangwan and Sukhwinder Singh, Sonali Phogat’s manager and his associate respectively, who have been charged with murdering and accused of forcibly administering methamphetamine to her on the night she died.
Three others, Edwin Nunes, the owner of the Curlies night club where she spent her final hours, Dattaprasad Gaonkar, a roomboy at the Grand Leoney Resort where Phogat and her team were staying, who is accused of supplying the methamphetamine to Sangwan and Singh, and Rama Mandrekar, from who Gaonkar procured the amphetamine, have been arrested.
