KEY POINTS:
KINGSTON - A Jamaican chambermaid said she found a bloodied bed, an overturned chair and a smell like alcohol and vomit when she stumbled on former Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer's unconscious body in his Kingston hotel room earlier this year.
Bernice Robinson, the first witness to testify as a long-awaited inquest opened into Woolmer's startling death during the Cricket World Cup, said his body lay blocking the bathroom door of room 374 at the Pegasus hotel, one of his feet stretched up to the wash basin.
"I started to look around the room, and I noticed that there was a chair that was overturned," she said.
"There was blood on the pillow and the bed. I continued looking around the room and didn't see him. And then I went into the bathroom. The door was closed, I knocked, got no response, then I tried to open the door but I couldn't open it as something was pressing against it."
Robinson said she panicked and shouted, "Sir, sir, is everything OK?" before running for help. She recalled a smell "like vomit and alcohol mixed together" and saw vomit on the bathroom floor.
Her discovery of Woolmer's unconscious body on March 18, a day after Pakistan crashed out of the World Cup following an ignominious defeat by underdogs Ireland, kicked off a maelstrom that gripped the international cricket world for months.
Jamaican police initially said Woolmer was strangled and launched a murder investigation. That touched off frenzied media speculation that the former English international player, 58, might have been killed by a gambling syndicate or disgruntled Pakistani fans or players.
But the Jamaican police delivered another shock in June by saying they had made a mistake about the murder claim and that pathologists from Canada, Britain and South Africa had found Woolmer died of natural causes.
The murder allegations and the subsequent climbdown by police were seen by many Jamaicans as a blow to the image of their tourism-dependent Carribbean island, which has long been plagued by one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Coroner Patrick Murphy, who is presiding over the inquest, took careful notes during the testimony and told a jury of six women and five men the inquest would probably last until November 9. He said it would be up to them to decide Woolmer's cause of death.
Kent Pantry, the Jamaica's director of public prosecutions said he expected the inquest to run smoothly.
"I think that things should go pretty OK. The jury will have the final say. I am just here to marshal the evidence," he told Reuters.
- REUTERS
