Police
in New Delhi investigating a spot-fixing cricket scandal on Thursday ordered
the owner of an Indian Premier League (IPL) team not to leave India, an officer
told AFP.Raj Kundra, husband of actress Shilpa Shetty and one of the owners of
Rajasthan Royals, was ordered to hand over his passport to a police team trying
to establish a link between corrupt players and organised crime syndicates.
"As
Kundra is part of our investigations, he has been told not to leave the country
and hand over his passport," the senior officer told AFP on condition of
anonymity. Kundra was questioned by police for 10 hours on Wednesday.
So far,
three players from his Rajasthan Royals team have been arrested over
allegations of spot-fixing during the sixth edition of the cash-rich Twenty20
IPL tournament. "He is basically found involved in betting and we have not
yet been able to connect him to (spot) fixing," the investigator said as
police quizzed Kundra in New Delhi.
Police
are unlikely to book Kundra under India's anti-gambling law which is a bailable
offence.
"We
don't want to lose focus from our main investigation into the involvement of
crime syndicates" in the IPL, the officer said in an interview.Test bowler
Shanthakumaran Sreesanth and two of his teammates were arrested last month,
accused of deliberately bowling badly in specific IPL matches in exchange for
tens of thousands of dollars from bookmakers.
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| Rajathan Royals Owner Raj Kundra and Shilpa Shetty with Rahul Dravid |
A court
denied the players bail on Tuesday after police said they had evidence to prove
organised crime syndicates were involved in the scandal.Delhi's police
commissioner has told AFP that players for some of the eight other IPL teams
were also under suspicion.
The
developments came two days after a Mumbai court granted bail to the son-in-law
of India's cricket chief who was also arrested last month over the illegal
betting scandal.Gurunath Meiyappan, part of the management of the Chennai Super
Kings team, has been accused of placing bets on matches through a Bollywood
actor who was also arrested.
Spot-fixing, in which a specific part of the match but not the outcome
is fixed, is illegal. Betting on the IPL is also illegal under India's laws
which ban gambling on all sports except horse-racing. Meiyappan is the
son-in-law of Indian cricket board chief N. Srinivasan who on Sunday stepped
aside pending the outcome of an internal probe into allegations of spot-fixing
in IPL matches.
