Peter Roebuck

It looks like the investigation into the death of Peter Roebuck is far from over. The Australian sports journalist committed suicide at the Newlands Southern Sun hotel last weekend. He jumped six floors to his death from his hotel room window.

Police will now talk to 16 young men – aged 18 to 26 – whose education was being paid for by the sportsman and who lived at his eight-bedroom house in Pietermaritzburg. The men are mostly Zimbabwean, and many came from a home for abandoned boys in the country’s capital of Harare.

Roebuck had been accused of sexually assaulting one of them before his suicide. The alleged victim, Ital Gondo laid a charge of indecent assault against the former Somerset captain after claiming he had been “groomed” through Facebook.

This is not the first time Roebuck was involved with something like this. He was at the centre of controversy in 2001 when he received a suspended jail sentence for common assault after beating three teenage cricketers “across their bare buttocks with a cane”. The South African boys had been invited to stay at his former home in Taunton, Somerset, for coaching in the late 1990s.

[Source: Daily Mail]