Published: Sep 25, 2015, 06:15 PM (IST)
Edited: Sep 25, 2015, 11:54 PM (IST)
Peter Roebuck’s family and lawyer have expressed fear of the late writer’s investigation going haywire due to the expected book on the life of the English cricketer. Chasing Shadows: The Life and Death of Peter Roebuck is written by the writer’s long-time ABC colleague Tim Lane and co-written by Elliot Cartledge. The promotional message of the book states, “part biography, part personal reflection and part investigation.” The book also focuses on Roebuck’s death on November 12, 2011, where the police authorities had said that the writer leapt from the window of his sixth-floor hotel room after the officers came to arrest him for allegedly sexually assaulting a Zimbabwean man. Peter Roebuck — He wrote a foreword to a book on cricket suicides 20 years before he took his own life
“We have raised objections to some of its content, particularly where it might impact on any inquest,” the family’s legal team was quoted as saying by Sydney Morning Herald. “Hardie Grant have declined to provide us with a transcript of the book to allay our client’s concerns, and have not yet provided us with any substantive response to the concerns and objections raised,” the spokesman from Manchester-based Ralli Solicitors added. Lane, commenting on the issue, said, “Without divulging what’s in the book we realise we needed to bear to mind the possibility that if [an inquest] did happen we didn’t want to be discredited by its outcome. We had to give some serious thought to it but we made a decision with the publishers to proceed.”
Earlier in August, an inquest into the apparent suicide of Roebuck in South Africa four years ago, was set to be reopened. English-born Roebuck, 55, was covering the Test series between South Africa and Australia in 2011 when he plunged to his death from the Southern Sun Hotel in Cape Town. South African police said he leapt out of a sixth floor window after two officers arrived to arrest him over a claim of sexual assault by a Zimbabwean man. Australia’s Fairfax Media said his family had since dealt with obstructionism from authorities with a closed hearing in Cape Town into the circumstances of the death in 2013 about which neither they nor the continent’s largest law firm, which represents them, were notified.
