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Change Your Life! |
Investigators
question Azharuddin. |
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News |
June 23, 2000
NEW DELHI (AP) - Federal investigators on Thursday questioned former Indian cricket captain Mohammed Azharuddin, who allegedly introduced former South African skipper Hansie Cronje to an Indian bookie in a match-fixing scandal that has shaken the sport.
Azharuddin refused to talk to reporters who mobbed him as he emerged from the office of the Central Bureau of Investigation in New Delhi, where officials questioned him for two and a half hours.
"This is a preliminary inquiry. We are yet to register a case," said S.M. Khan, a spokesman for the CBI, which has questioned more than half a dozen cricketers and officials in the past one month.
"We recorded Azharuddin's statement." The scandal erupted when a former player, Manoj Prabhakar accused the current team coach Kapil Dev of offering him 2.5 million rupees (dlrs 55,555) to play below form in a cricket match against archrival Pakistan in 1994.
Dev led the team that won the World Cup in 1983. Last month, police in New Delhi charged South African skipper Cronje and three other South African players of fraud and cheating. The government then asked the federal police to probe the match fixing scandal.
Testifying before a commission of inquiry probing corruption in the sport in South Africa, Cronje said last week in Cape Town that he had accepted a dlrs 30,000 bribe from a bookie whom Azharuddin introduced to him in 1996.
Azharuddin denied Cronje accusation made before the commission last Thursday.
Cronje claimed that he had only correctly forecast the outcome of a match. But he confessed to receiving money on several occasions from bookmakers since 1996.
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