Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Union minister Shashi Tharoor, found dead in Delhi hotel

NEW DELHI: Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Union minister Shashi Tharoor, has reportedly been found dead in a five-star hotel here.

Pushkar’s body was found in room number 345 of Leela Hotel. The incident came to fore around 8pm after the hotel authorities informed the police.

The special commissioner of police Deepak Mishra confirmed to TOI about the incident. However police were yet to ascertain if it was a suicide. Further investigations are on. The room in which 52-year -old Pushkar was staying has been sealed by the police.

The shocking news comes just a day after Sunanda and her husband Shashi Tharoor were involved in a Twitter controversy, also involving a Pakistani woman journalist, Mehr Tarar.

As the indecorous row surrounding the suave 57-year-old Tharoor escalated, the controversy-prone minister took to Twitter to come out with a joint statement with his wife Sunanda Pushkar to say they were “happily married”, but distressed by “some unauthorised tweets”.

“We wish to stress that we are happily married and intend to remain that way. Sunanda has been ill and hospitalised this week and is seeking rest. We would be grateful if the media respects our privacy,” said the statement by Tharoor, who married Pushkar in 2010. The row erupted after exchange of some messages involving the three, some of them intimate.

“We are distressed by the unseemly controversy that has arisen about some unauthorised tweets from our twitter accounts,” the diplomat-turned politician said.

Pushkar had accused the 45-year-old Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar of stalking her husband and trying to “break” her marriage when she was away for medical treatment.

Both Tharoor and Pushkar had married twice before. The minister of state for human resources development is a Congress Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram.