Former cricketer Clive Rice yesterday urged authorities to reinvestigate the inquiries into the deaths of former Pakistani coach Bob Woolmer and former SA captain Hansie Cronje.
He said this in the light of the latest Pakistani betting scandal. On the Thaindian News website, Rice is reported as saying that he feared mafia betting syndicates had murdered Woolmer and Cronje. “These mafia betting syndicates do not stop at anything and they do not care who get in their way,” Rice was quoted as saying to Fox Sports.
Speaking to The Citizen yesterday, Rice said there were many questionable aspects to the two deaths. “Let’s look at Bob’s case. Despite a local doctor saying there were signs of Bob being strangled, the death was later covered up and reported as a heart attack. This really does not make sense,” said Rice. Woolmer was found dead in his hotel room on March 18, 2007 at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica. The initial report was that he had died of a heart attack.
On March 22, Jamaican police confirmed that a murder investigation had been launched due to the circumstances of the death, based on a report by pathologist Ere Seshaiah that Woolmer had died of asphyxia via manual strangulation. They suspected that the murderer might have been a Pakistani upset over Pakistan’s defeat by Ireland in the World Cup. But on June 12, 2007, Lucius Thomas, commissioner of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, announced that the investigation had concluded that Woolmer had died of natural causes. “In Hansie’s case, the flight beacon went down for two minutes and the replacement never came back up. This is not right,” said Rice. Asked if he believed there was a cover-up, he said: “Absolutely, there is a cover-up on match-fixing. I want to put it out there that these two were probably killed and I would want their cases to be reinvestigated.” He added that he was not surprised to hear allegations that Pakistan had rigged the results of the fourth Test against England at Lord’s and the Sydney Test in January.
“My first response was: ‘What’s new?’,” he said. He called on the International Cricket Council to introduce reform and enforce strict policing to stamp out match- and spot-fixing.
, Both Hansie and Woolmer nearly exposed the cricket mafia,