The pathologist who concluded that Bob Woolmer was murdered, a verdict formally overturned by the Jamaican police yesterday, has insisted he was right.

“I am sticking to my findings. He was murdered,” the Indian-born pathologist Dr Ere Seshaiah told today’s Jamaica Observer newspaper. “I am confident he was murdered. Woolmer is not a first for me - I have been doing autopsies here since 1995.”

The pathologist found that a broken bone in the Pakistan cricket coach indicated that he had been strangled.

The 58-year-old former England international cricketer was found dead in his hotel room in Kingston in March, setting in motion a chain of fevered speculation about a possible motive.

Woolmer’s Pakistan team had been knocked out of the Cricket World Cup by lowly Ireland the previous day, and a series of theories speculated that the coach had been targeted by match-fixing criminals or even an irate fan.

However, at a press conference yesterday, Lucius Thomas, the head of Jamaica’s police force, announced that Woolmer had died of natural causes and had not been murdered.

Today, the Jamaican police spokesman Karl Angell said heart failure appeared to have been to blame. “Determining the cause of death is the remit of the coroner, but we are 99% sure that Woolmer died of heart failure,” he added.

Although Dr Seshaiah was not specifically criticised by police, at yesterday’s press conference deputy commissioner Mark Shields, the officer who led the investigation, deputy commissioner, repeatedly stressed that the murder investigation had been launched because of his report.

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