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Hansie Cronje is the only cricketer named in the chargesheet filed by the Delhi Police relating to the match-fixing case of 2000. The chargesheet was filed in a trial court on Monday, more than 13 years after the scandal broke.
When the issue first came to light, Delhi Police had charged the then South Africa captain Cronje with fixing his team's ODIs against India in March 2000 for money. Cronje had confessed to accepting money from bookmakers in June that year, while being cross-examined by the King Commission in Cape Town, and was banned for life in October. On June 1, 2002, Cronje was reported to have died in a plane crash near George in South Africa's southern Cape.
"There are six accused in this case, three of them are on bail while two are abroad," Inspector Keshav Kumar, the investigating officer in the case, told the court. "The sixth is Hansie Cronje, who is dead."
The others are bookmakers and gamblers Rajesh Kalra, Krishan Kumar and Sunil Dara, who are all out on bail, and Sanjeev Chawla and Manmohan Khattar, who are overseas.
Delhi Police have alleged that Cronje persuaded some of his teammates to agree to underperform in a one-day match in 2000. Batsman Herschelle Gibbs and bowler Henry Williams were both banned for six months and fined by South African authorities for their admissions in the scandal, which broke when the police, working on an unrelated extortion case, tapped a telephone conversation between Cronje and Chawla. He is believed by the police to be in the UK and they hope to seek his extradition now that the chargesheet has been filed.
"We will now request the court to grant approval to seek extradition of Chawla from the UK to India," Ravindra Yadav, additional commissioner of police (crime), told AFP. "The UK government does not allow extradition without the chargesheet. We are almost sure Chawla is in England.
"This is criminal conspiracy. People went to the ground to watch the games thinking they would be played in the true spirit. They did not know the outcome was fixed. That's why we have filed the charges."
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