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Indian Minister Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar has left behind a huge fortune, including properties, investments, watches and antiques worth millions, in India, the United Arab Emirates and Canada, sources said Thursday.
"The 52-year-old, who died under mysterious circumstances on the bed of her suite at a five-star hotel in the national capital last week, owned 12 flats in Dubai and a house at Ontario in Canada, apart from shares, deposits and cash in various currencies, worth millions," the sources said, citing her declaration to the Indian government last year.
Sunanda also had a collection of antique shahtoosh shawls which she inherited from her grandmother, they said, adding jewellery worth millions may also be lying in her bank lockers as well as a collection of 25 foreign watches.
It is, however, not clear who is going to inherit her fortune in absence of a will.
Sunanda was found lying dead on the bed of her hotel suite last Friday evening by the 57-year-old flamboyant junior Human Resource Development minister after he returned from a daylong conclave of the ruling Congress party, and he then informed the police about the death, one of his aides had said.
The couple had checked into the hotel last Thursday due to some painting work at their official residence, the aide claimed, contradicting media reports which suggested that Sunanda checked in Wednesday evening while her husband came there a day after.
The magistrate, heading the inquest into Sunanda's death, has ordered the police to probe murder and suicide angles into her death, following an autopsy report that she died of "drug poisoning" and several injury marks were also found on her body.
However, Sunanda's son from her second marriage has rejected the possibility of her mother ending her own life, but at the same time giving a clean chit to his step father.
"Anyone who knew my mother would simply know that she was too strong to commit suicide. I also do not believe that Shashi was capable of physically harming her, let alone the speculation that he could have taken her life. They were very much in love," son Shiv Menon said in a statement.
Sunanda was cremated Saturday evening and the funeral pyres were lit by Tharoor and Menon, hours after the autopsy at the premier All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences in the national capital.
She was reportedly upset over her husband's alleged illicit affair with a Pakistani journalist with whom she had a war of words through micro-blogging site Twitter. However, the couple who got married in 2010, their third wedding, had Thursday issued a joint statement, saying they were "happily married".
While the 45-year-old Pakistani columnist Mehr Tarar has denied the claims of an affair, Tharoor, a former United Nations diplomat who became Under Secretary General under former UN chief Kofi Annan but lost the race for the top job to Ban Ki Moon in 2006,is tight-lipped on the matter.
Tharoor joined the ruling Congress party after resigning from the United Nations in 2007, and became a Member of Parliament from the southern state of Kerala in 2009.
