Urooj Khan - Chicago Million Dollar Lottery Winner Victim of Homicide

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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/01/07/medical-examiner-chicago-lottery-winner-poisoned-with-cyanide-day-after/


Medical examiner: Chicago lottery winner poisoned with cyanide day after collecting $425,000

Published January 07, 2013

Associated Press

CHICAGO –  A Chicago medical examiner says a lottery winner was fatally poisoned with cyanide a day after he collected nearly $425,000.

Cook County Medical Examiner Stephen Cina (SEE'-nuh) says a limited exam initially found Urooj (oo-ROOJ') Khan died of natural causes, but a relative asked for a deeper investigation.

A full toxicology test revealed Khan had ingested a deadly amount of cyanide, and his death was re-classified as a homicide.

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[klaasend]

NEW BLINK POST:

http://blinkoncrime.com/2013/01/08/lottery-winner-urooj-khan-victim-of-homicide-wife-cashes-check-issued-day-after-his-death-payable-to-bank-of-me/

Lottery Winner Urooj Khan Victim Of Homicide: Wife Cashes Check Issued Day After His Death Payable To “Bank Of Me”

[grace-land]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-cyanide-homicide-court-fight-20130109,0,3384978.story

Wife of poisoned lottery winner was questioned by police, her attorney says
January 9, 2013

The widow of a West Rogers Park man who died of cyanide poisoning weeks after winning a $1 million lottery jackpot was questioned extensively by Chicago police last month after the medical examiner's office reclassified the death as a homicide, her attorney told the Tribune on Tuesday.
 
Authorities investigating the death of Urooj Khan also executed a search warrant at the home he had shared with his wife, Shabana Ansari, according to Steven Kozicki, her attorney. Ansari later was interviewed by detectives for more than four hours, answering all their questions, the attorney said.
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Cook County authorities said Tuesday that they plan to go to court in the next few days for approval to exhume Khan's remains at Rosehill Cemetery. In a telephone interview Tuesday, Medical Examiner Stephen J. Cina said he sent a sworn statement to prosecutors laying out why the body must be exhumed.
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While a motive has not been determined, police have not ruled out that Khan was killed because of his big lottery win, a law enforcement source has told the Tribune. He died before he could collect the winnings — about $425,000 after taxes and because he decided to take a lump-sum payment.
 
According to court records obtained by the Tribune, Khan's brother has squabbled with Ansari over the money in probate court. The brother, Imtiaz, raised concern that because Khan left no will, his 17-year-old daughter from a previous marriage would not get "her fair share" of her father's estate. Khan and Ansari did not have children.
 
Al-Haroon Husain, an attorney for Ansari in the probate case, said the money was all accounted for and the estate was in the process of being divided up by the court. Under Illinois law, the estate typically would be split evenly between the surviving spouse and Khan's only child, he said.
 
Kozicki, Ansari's criminal defense attorney, said his client adored her husband and had no financial interest in seeing harm come to him.
 
"Now in addition to grieving her husband, she's struggling to run the business that he essentially ran while he was alive," Kozicki said. "Once people analyze it, they (would) realize she's in a much worse financial position after his death than she was before."
 
Reached by phone Tuesday evening at the family dry cleaners, Ansari denied reports that she had fed her husband a traditional Indian meal of ground beef curry before he died. She said he wasn't feeling well after awakening in the middle of the night. She said he sat in a chair and soon collapsed. She then called 911.
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[grace-land]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-cyanide-lottery-winner-poison-exhumation,0,2627635.story

Autopsy today for lottery winner poisoned by cyanide
11:05 a.m. CST, January 18, 2013

Officials will conduct an autopsy this morning on the body of a West Rogers Park man who was exhumed from Rosehill Cemetery on Chicago's North Side after dying of cyanide poisoning last summer after winning a million-dollar lottery.
 
A hearse was being opened in front of a green tent set up at the grave site just north of Peterson Avenue and Urooj Khan's body was loaded into it. An evidence technician snapped a photo of it before the hearse's rear doors were closed up and the vehicle began driving away across the grass on the cemetery, escorted by a Chicago police evidence technician squad car and several other marked and unmarked police vehicles. They exited west onto Peterson Avenue.
 
The whole exhumation process lasted about two hours.

Khan's body was not frozen, officials said, and his autopsy will be today. A medical examiner's office spokeswoman, Mary Paleologos, said Khan's body will be buried again on Monday.
 
Dr. Marta Helenowski, the forensic pathologist who originally handled Khan's case, will be performing the autopsy this morning at the medical examiner's office, 2121 W. Harrison St., Paleologos said in a telephone interview.
 
The pathologist is going to be taking samples of Khan's lungs, liver and spleen for further testing. She will also be looking at the contents of Khan's stomach and intestines and taking bone, nail and hair samples, all for further examination, according Paleologos.
 
"Depending on the condition of the body and the quality of the samples, (the medical examiner's office) will hopefully be able to determine how the cyanide entered his body," Paleologos said.
 
Chief Medical Examiner Stephen J. Cina will hold a 2:30 p.m. news conference about the autopsy. He will likely only be able to discuss whether Khan's body is in good condition and if the samples taken from it are good quality.
 
It'll be two or three weeks before the medical examiner's office knows how the cyanide got into Khan's system. The office will also have to wait for independent lab test results.
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[grace-land]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-cyanide-lottery-winner-poison-exhumation,0,2627635.story

Results could take weeks after autopsy of poisoned lottery winner
3:47 p.m. CST, January 18, 2013

Chief Cook County Medical Examiner Stephen J. Cina said this afternoon that the body of lottery winner Urooj Khan, exhumed as part of a homicide investigation, was in an advanced state of decomposition but pathologists were able to take samples for toxicological analysis during an autopsy.

It could take several weeks before the test results are available, Cina said.

"I can't really predict how the results are going to turn out. Cyanide over the postmortem period actually can essentially evaporate and leave the tissue," Cina told reporters in the lobby of the medical examiner's office on the Near West Side. "It is possible that cyanide that was in the tissues is no longer in the tissues after several months. We'll just have to see how the results play out."

Cina said it took a few hours to complete the autopsy following the exhumation of Khan’s body from Rosehill Cemetery this morning.
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[grace-land]

Two-page article

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/poisoned-lotto-winners-widow-proof-stake-estate/story?id=18441474

Poisoned Lotto Winner's Widow Said She Has Proof of Her Estate Claim
Feb. 8, 2013

The widow of poisoned lottery winner Urooj Khan has presented documents purporting to show that most of Khan's estate belongs to her.
 
Al-Haroon Husain, an attorney for Khan's widow, Shabana Ansari, said Khan signed a document two months before his death, stating that his portion of his dry cleaning business would go to his wife if he died.
 
Signed May 2, this "operating agreement" presented to the probate court on Thursday indicates that two-thirds of Khan's estate would go to Ansari, Husain said. Khan reportedly did not have a will, Husain and Khan's siblings contend.
 
Ansari, 32, and Khan's siblings are in a legal dispute over Khan's assets, which include his winnings from a $1 million jackpot distributed in July.
 
A copy of the 38-page document provided to ABC News appears to that an agreement between Khan and his business partner, Mohammed Shaker, included a clause that read: "Members shall transfer their interest to their respective spouse upon member's death."
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[grace-land]

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/18076851-418/poisoned-lottery-winner-signed-paper-leaving-his-stake-in-dry-cleaning-business-to-his-wife.html

Most of poisoned lottery winner’s estate goes to widow — brother says ‘nonsense’
February 7, 2013 3:58PM
Updated: February 8, 2013 2:23AM

Adding another twist to the mystery of the poisoned lottery winner, a lawyer representing his widow produced documents Thursday that the attorney said show that two-thirds of the deceased North Side businessman’s $2 million estate automatically goes to the widow.

Bolstering the claim, attorney Al-Haroon Husain produced an agreement he said million-dollar lottery winner Urooj Khan signed two months before his death, stipulating that his interest in a dry cleaning operation would go to his wife, Shabana Ansari, in the event of his death.

The so-called “operating agreement” was signed May 2, said Husain, who’s representing Ansari in a pending court case to divvy up her late husband’s assets. That includes the proceeds from Khan’s winning lottery ticket.

But the dead man’s brother called the agreement “baseless and nonsense” and said its sudden appearance is fishy.
 
“Why would he [sign an agreement] to transfer everything to his wife? Did he know that he was going to die? Did he know [someone] was going to kill him?” Imtiaz Khan said.
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[grace-land]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-cyanide-poisoning-brother-20130211,0,4675044.story

Brother says he raised suspicions in death of lottery winner
February 11, 2013

About a week after the unexpected death of his younger brother, Imtiaz Khan was visiting the grave at a Far North Side cemetery, grief-stricken and bewildered.
 
Khan was troubled that the Cook County medical examiner's office had determined his brother, Urooj, died of natural causes at 46. His death seemed far too coincidental to accept, especially because his brother's $1 million lottery win weeks earlier had created some tension within his family, according to Khan.
 
On the day in July that he claimed the body at the morgue, Khan had pleaded with an employee there to take another look at his brother's death. Several followup calls had gone unreturned. Now as Khan stood by his brother's grave, his cellphone went off. On the line was a forensic pathologist familiar with his brother's case.

"I said, 'No, my brother cannot die like this. He was so healthy. I have suspicions about this. It cannot be natural. Please go and look into more details about it,'" Khan recalled last week of the approximately 20-minute conversation with the doctor. "I'm looking at the grave. I said, 'He should not be here. Absolutely not. He cannot die like that.'"
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[grace-land]

http://www.suntimes.com/news/sneed/18212136-452/condition-of-lottery-winners-body-makes-it-impossible-to-tell-how-cyanide-was-taken.html

Condition of lottery winner’s body makes it impossible to tell how cyanide was taken
February 14, 2013 7:32AM

The whodunit file . . .
 
Sneed has learned the investigation into the mysterious death of $1 million lottery winner Urooj Khan, who died of cyanide poisoning, may have taken a setback.
 
A mixture of money, meatballs and murder may be the recipe that killed Khan last summer — but Sneed is told the state of the lottery winner’s body makes it hard for the Cook County medical examiner’s office to determine just how he was poisoned with cyanide.
 
Khan’s body, exhumed and reburied recently as part of the murder probe, “was so badly decomposed it was impossible to tell whether the cyanide was ingested or inhaled,” said a top Sneed source.
 
Sneed exclusively reported on Jan. 10 that Khan, the victim of this deadly whodunit, was not embalmed before burial, in accordance with Muslim tradition. “That is why the body, which was buried last summer, was so decomposed,” the source added.

Sneed reported Wednesday that preliminary test results after the exhumation definitely showed that Khan died of cyanide poisoning.
 
“The medical examiner’s office is now waiting for a report on heavy metal or arsenic being present in the body,” a source said. “That report should be back” Thursday.
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[grace-land]

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=9012199

Poisoned lottery winner autopsy confirms homicide
Updated at 11:48 AM today
 
March 1, 2013 (CHICAGO) (WLS) -- The Cook County medical examiner says an autopsy on the exhumed body of a Chicago lottery winner who was poisoned with cyanide yielded no significant new clues, though he confirmed Urooj Khan's death is still considered a homicide.

• VIDEO: Poisoned lottery winner's body exhumed

Cook County medical examiner Dr. Stephen Cina said Friday morning that no cyanide was found in Urooj Khan's body tissue but that was most likely because cyanide breaks down quickly. He says nothing significant was found in Khan's stomach.

"The route of administration of cyanide cannot be confirmed in the autopsy," said Cina. "There was severe -- about 75 percent -- stenosis, which is blockage, of one of the major coronary arteries."

Cina says Khan's July 20 death is still considered a homicide because tests on fluids drawn from his body before he was buried revealed he had been poisoned.
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