As the body of slain Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, on April 29 for a burial by his family, mystery continued to surround how he had died.

The 58-year-old former England test batsman,was found unconscious in his room and later declared dead on March 18, the day after Ireland eliminated his team from the World Cup.

On April 30, the BBC’s investigative programme Panorama said that a toxicology test on Woolmer’s body had found the presence of a drug that would have meant that Woolmer had been incapacitated before he was strangled. Panorama did not cite a source for this allegation.

It also showed closed-circuit television footage of two people speaking to Woolmer before he went to his room.

However, Majid Bhatti, senior cricket correspondent of the Jung group of newspapers, spotted along with Ehsan Qureshi of state-owned news agency APP, identified in media reports as the two men seen with Woolmer, said: “I started getting calls from everywhere and I was surprised to learn about the footage. But it was from March 16, one day before the match against Ireland and we were speaking to Woolmer as we returned from a party for the Irish team”.

A day after the BBC programme, the Associated Press reported Mark Shields, the deputy police commissioner in Jamaica, as insisting that his investigators had not concluded that Woolmer was drugged.

“No results and we have NOT confirmed anything,” the former Scotland Yard police officer said in an SMS to AP from his mobile phone. “Work is ongoing.”

Shields said that toxicology tests done in Jamaica had been sent with British police officers to a government-owned laboratory in the UK, The Forensic Science Service, to be “independently verified”.

Shields said that he had not yet heard back from the British laboratory. He would not discuss whether the toxicology tests indicated the presence of a drug that could have incapacitated Woolmer.

AP reported that Shields had said in the past that foreign investigators would examine theories that Woolmer may have been drugged. He said that would have made it easier to strangle a man as large as Woolmer, a former England test batsman.

“A lot of force would be needed to do that,” Shields told the BBC. “Bob Woolmer was a large man and that’s why one could argue that it was an extremely strong person, or maybe more than one person, but equally the lack of external injuries suggests that there might be some other factors and that’s what we’re looking into at the moment.”

The South African Press Association (Sapa) reported from Cape Town on April 30 that Woolmer’s family had met undertakers to discuss his funeral, but details of the ceremony were being kept under wraps.

The family had decided to keep it a “totally, totally private affair”, said Theo Rix, Western Cape manager for Doves funeral parlour, Sapa reported.

Only family members would be involved in the ceremony and no cricket officials would attend. Rix said further details of the funeral will not be released to the media, Sapa said.