Family Feud Behind PIO Lottery Winner’s Death?

The annals of US lottery history is filled with a litany of bad luck --winners who blew their jackpot and went broke after poor decisions and lousy investments. Urooj Khan never got that far; he died, possibly murdered by someone’s greed, even before he got to collect his winnings. 

    
Khan, an India-born owner of a three-store dry cleaning franchise in Chicago, had won $1 million in an Illinois state scratch-off lottery a few days before he keeled over and collapsed at midnight last July after eating a meal of keema (ground beef), according to his wife Shabana Ansari. She called 911, and the medical examiner’s office later declared his death to be from natural causes after finding no trauma to his body, and toxicology reports showed no unusual substances in his blood. 
    
The likely cause of death was said to be arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which covers heart attacks, stroke or ruptured aneurysms. There was no autopsy. 
    
Not so fast, an unnamed relative complained to authorities a few weeks later, demanding a closer scrutiny of Khan’s death, amid rumors of family squabbles over Khan’s estate. Khan was already a wealthy man before he died, and the $425,000 lottery winnings (which Khan had opted to take in a one-time lumpsum payout after taxes) would have added to his estate, which, because he had left no will, would under local law be divided between Shabana Ansari, his second wife, and Jasmine, his 17-year old daughter from an earlier marriage. 
    
The local county medical examiner then re-opened the case and retested fluid samples that had been taken from Khan’s body, including tests for cyanide and strychnine. When the final toxicology results came back in late November, they showed a lethal level of cyanide, leading to the opening of a homicide investigation. 
    
Khan, authorities now, say may have been killed, although they do not immediately link the death to the lottery. They plan to exhume Khan’s body within the next two weeks as part of the investigation. 
    
Authorities have meanwhile extensively questioned Khan’s wife, whose family is from Hyderabad, and also executed a search warrant at the home he had shared with her. But in television interviews she has said she loved her husband, has nothing to hide and would be happy if the investigation yielded the truth. “I want the truth to come out in the investigation, the sooner the better,” she told ABC. “Who could be that person who hurt him?” She also said she did not demand the re-opening of the case and has no idea who did. 
    
“It has been an incredibly hard time,” she added, saying she was struggling to keep his dry cleaning business going. “We went from being the happiest the day we got the check. It was the best sleep I’ve had. And then the next day, everything was gone.”