This report – “Shashi Tharoor drops a bomb, says some in Congress know who killed Sunanda” – was curated from a news report published by the Hindi newspaper Punjab Kesari.
A few days after publishing this report, we received a legal notice from a lawyer claiming to represent Mr Shashi Tharoor. The notice asked us to remove the report from our site since the lawyer claimed Tharoor had not made the remarks, as reported by Punjab Kesari.
While we were consulting our legal advisers on the best course forward, we realised that Punjab Kesari had abruptly removed the story from its site, without giving any explanations. Screenshot of the original story can be seen here and the tweet from Punjab Kesari which carried the story can be seen here:
पार्टी के कुछ लोगों जानते हैं सुनंदा का कातिल कौन है: थरूर http://t.co/4ZBtRVlqiJ #sunandapushkar #shashitharoor pic.twitter.com/R1Ol6UyfXD
— Punjab Kesari (@punjabkesari) January 28, 2015
We then began to search independently for news reports which would corroborate the report of Punjab Kesari. However, being a small team with very limited resources, we couldn’t get confirmation from public sources.
In such a scenario, we are removing the report as we can’t verify the content that was originally published by Punjab Kesari. Either no other Media outlet has reported this or other media outlets too have been asked to remove this story by the office of Mr Tharoor.
In the absence of any explanation from Punjab Kesari, we cannot confirm whether the original report by them was erroneous or if it was removed for other reasons best known to them.
We regret this inconvenience to our readers.
