Police in Jamaica have privately admitted that their investigation into the “murder” of Bob Woolmer during the cricket World Cup may have been based on errors by the pathologist who examined his body.

The role of Dr Ere Seshaiah, the Kingston pathologist, is now under scrutiny after a review of his autopsy report concluded he was wrong to suggest Woolmer was strangled.

The future of the investigation – now in its tenth week – will hinge on toxicology tests that are seeking to determine if Woolmer was poisoned with a herbicide.

But a senior Jamaican police officer involved in the inquiry admitted that it now looked likely that Woolmer died from a heart attack induced by sickness. “I would go for natural causes, he said.

The unravelling of cricket’s most notorious murder case will prove highly embarrassing to the Jamaican authorities. Questions are already being asked about how an inquiry conducted under the eyes of the world could get it so wrong.

There could be a number of errors but the most important appears to be the postmortem examination by Seshaiah. He told The Sunday Times that he stood by his diagnosis that Woolmer was killed by “asphyxia as a result of manual strangulation”.

But does the evidence substantiate this?

Woolmer’s body was found in his room at the Pegasus hotel, Kingston, on March 18. It was the morning after Pakistan, the team he coached, had been knocked out of the cricket World Cup by the rank outsiders Ireland. The former England player had been vomiting but there was no sign of a struggle. “The scene was not disturbed. If someone was strangled you would expect some resistance or fight,” the senior officer said. A grown man would be expected to fight a strangler and acquire bruises and abrasions around the neck but there was none on Woolmer.

Indeed, Seshaiah, an Indian who moved to Jamaica 12 years ago, concluded after his initial autopsy that the cause of death was inconclusive. It was only when he reexamined the body that he found the suspicious evidence.

Seshaiah said last week that he made two significant findings: the hyoid bone in the neck was fractured; and there were three contusions, or bruises, inside tissues of the neck and a larger one at the base of the tongue. Broken hyoids are a classic sign of strangulation but only when other factors are present. So the contusions were the clinching factor for Seshaiah. He said: “Even if the hyoid bone is intact, the contusion is sufficient to say he’s strangled.”

Surprisingly, given how central his findings were to the investigation, a second autopsy was never carried out. The postmortem report and photographs were sent to Dr Nat Carey, the British pathologist who examined the victims in the Soham murders and Ipswich killings. Carey’s report – which was submitted to Mark Shields, the deputy commissioner of Jamaican police – dismisses the strangulation theory. Carey has requested an x-ray of Woolmer’s hyoid (which has been retained) indicating that there might be doubts as to whether it was actually broken.

Seshaiah based his diagnosis on a visual examination of the hyoid and concluded, without x-ray, that it was fractured because it could bend in his hands. This, according to a senior British pathologist, was a mistake. The hyoid’s component bones are normally fused but sometimes they can be bent because the gristle between them has remained pliable.

When The Sunday Times spoke to Carey last week he declined to comment on the case directly. However, he made the point that hyoid fractures could be caused by a fall, resuscitation or poor autopsy technique.

He said: “It is an important thing that just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, so a fractured hyoid doesn’t make a strangulation. That is the very heart of the case.”

Referring to a previous report on the case in this newspaper, he said: “When someone has been strangled there is a great likelihood that they will have asphyxial changes in their facial skin [such as blood spots]. You already have opinion from the pathologists you spoke to that on the basis of the photographs [of Woolmer’s body] you saw, that there weren’t asphyxial changes on the facial skin.”

Jamaican police have now approached the FBI to find a pathologist who can give a third opinion. But the senior officer expressed concerns about the state of Kingston’s pathology service where a handful of pathologists deal with up to 2,000 murders a year. Last week Shields travelled to South Africa to inform Woolmer’s widow, Gill, that he was probably not murdered.

Professor Derek Pounder, a pathologist from Dundee University has witnessed the chaotic scenes in Kingston’s crowded mortuaries where bodies are often stacked on top of each other. “The pathologists in Kingston...are underfunded, overworked and limited by an archaic administration,” he said.

Pounder believes the contusions in Woolmer’s neck were probably caused by dissection during the postmortem examination. This would cause “artefacts” – gradual bleeding – which would appear quite marked by the time Seshaiah re-examined the body.

Questions still remain over toxicology findings in Jamaica that suggest Woolmer was poisoned by weedkiller. Two weeks ago, a Jamaican police source claimed Woolmer had ingested enough weedkiller to kill him. It was found in his stomach and on his champagne glass. Police now appear satisfied the substance was not in the champagne bottles.

One finding that could be important is that Woolmer had a “very” enlarged heart. Pounder believes this might provide a more simple explanation.

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