Peter Roebuck inquest set to be reopened: Report

Johannesburg: The inquest into the suicide of former cricketer and newspaper columnist Peter Roebuck’s could be reopened after South Africa’s director of Public Prosecutions for the Western Province opened a review, according to a report on ESPNcricinfo.com.

The report said that the original closed inquest, which was completed in February 2013, was conducted sans anyone representing Roebuck or his family. Roebuck died in November 2011 after falling from his hotel room window in Cape Town, where he was covering the Test series between Australia and South Africa. While the cops had termed the death as a suicide, Roebuck’s family demanded more clarity surrounding the incident.

It later emerged that on the night of the incident, the Englishman had been confronted by South African police over charges of sexual assault. Papers related to the original inquest had been requested by DPP nearly 18 months ago. However, it was told by the cops that the documents had been lost.

“Areas likely to be probed in any new inquest would include wider use of forensic evidence, including fingerprints taken by police at the hotel on the night but not produced before the magistrate who conducted the original inquest and concluded that Roebuck had died from ‘multiple injuries’ without explicitly stating how those injuries came about,” the ESPNcricinfo.com report stated.