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Woolmer case takes a fatwa twist

‘Killer not from Jamaica’

Lon­don, PTI

Woolmer was upset that sev­er­al mem­bers of the Pak­istani team were fol­low­ers of the Tab­lighi Jamaat, a Mus­lim revival­ist move­ment, Pak­istani media man­ag­er Per­vez Mir indi­cat­ed on Tues­day dur­ing the BBC’s Panora­ma pro­gramme.

A fat­wa angle has emerged in the mys­te­ri­ous mur­der of Bob Woolmer, with the dis­clo­sure that the Pak­istan coach was report­ed­ly unhap­py with the time spent by play­ers on prayers.

Woolmer was upset that sev­er­al mem­bers of the Pak­istani team were fol­low­ers of the Tab­lighi Jamaat, a Mus­lim revival­ist move­ment, Pak­istani media man­ag­er Per­vez Mir indi­cat­ed on Tues­day dur­ing the BBC’s Panora­ma pro­gramme, which focused on Bob Woolmer’s mur­der in a Jamaican hotel six weeks ago.

Focus on reli­gion
Accord­ing to Mir, Woolmer felt that the play­ers were focus­ing more on their reli­gion than on the game. He went on to claim that Woolmer could have even invit­ed a fat­wa had he gone pub­lic with his feel­ings about the play­ers’ focus on prayer.

Recall­ing an inci­dent, Mir said, “A Tab­lighi CD was being played and Bob, who was sit­ting behind me, said, ‘Why don’t you tell them to stop? If they want to lis­ten to that, they can do that on their iPods or per­son­al devices’. He thought that he shouldn’t be sub­ject­ed to all that, and I agreed with Bob.”

Mir said Woolmer had appre­hen­sions about the play­ers’ dwin­dling focus on crick­et.

“He wasn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly pleased when play­ers went out to pray in the mid­dle of the game.. and sub­sti­tutes kept com­ing in again and again. He was total­ly against it,” he said.

Mir’s obser­va­tion that Inza­mam-ul Haq and his team­mates prayed more and played less irked quite a few back home and the media man­ag­er had to flee Pak­istan after a fat­wa was issued against him.

Mir had no doubt that “there would have been a fat­wa against him (Woolmer) as well, had the coach made his obser­va­tions pub­lic.”

The BBC pro­gramme said Inza­mam and oth­er key play­ers of the Pak­istani squad had become mem­bers of the Tab­lighi Jamat and the group lis­tened to prayers and ser­mons while trav­el­ling with the rest of the squad on the team bus.

The killer
The pro­gramme also quot­ed the deputy com­mis­sion­er of Jamaican Police Mark Shields as say­ing that Woolmer was mur­dered by some­one who had come from out­side the Caribbean coun­try.

“The dif­fer­ence between Bob Woolmer’s mur­der and most of these is that Jamaican killers tend to use knives or guns. The fact that Bob Woolmer was stran­gled has made the police infer that his killer had come from out­side Jamaica,” he stat­ed.

He said that on March 18, the day Woolmer was found dead in his hotel room, nine mur­der cas­es had been reg­is­tered across the coun­try.

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