The Director of Public Prosecutions in South Africa is believed to be ready to reopen an inquest into cricket writer Peter Roebuck’s death while in police custody.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that after four years of stonewalling from South African police, the family of the late Peter Roebuck are set to finally be given access to evidence from the Cape Town hotel room where he spent the final minutes of his life.

Roebuck, a long-standing Fairfax Media cricket correspondent, died on November 12, 2011, it was said by police, when he leapt from a window in his sixth-floor hotel room after two officers arrived to arrest him over a claim of sexual assault by a Zimbabwean man.

In the four years since, his family has dealt with obstructionism from authorities, who held a closed hearing in Cape Town into his death in 2013 of which neither they nor the continent’s largest law firm, which represents them, were even notified.

Further, access to any forensic evidence taken from the hotel room has been denied, as has the police toxicology report and fingerprints from the window. Requests for Roebuck’s mobile phone to be returned have also been repeatedly rejected.

At the time of his death Roebuck was a long-time cricket writer for Business Day Sport Monthly, published by Highbury Safika Media, which also produces SACricket and SACricketmag.com. 

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