SAN JUAN (Puerto Rico), May 1: The top Jamaican policeman investigating the homicide of Pakistan's cricket coach said he has not confirmed that Bob Woolmer was incapacitated by a drug before being strangled.

The BBC reported that a toxicology test on Woolmer's body shows the presence of a drug that would have incapacitated him.

Mark Shields, the deputy police commissioner in Jamaica, on Monday emphatically said his investigators have not concluded that Woolmer was drugged.

“No results and we have NOT confirmed anything,” the former Scotland Yard policeman said in a text message to The Associated Press from his cell phone. “Work is ongoing.”

Shields said toxicology tests were done in Jamaica and sent with British police officers to a government-owned laboratory in their country, The Forensic Science Service, to be “independently verified.”

Shields has not yet heard back from the British laboratory. In a brief telephone interview with AP, he would not discuss whether the toxicology tests indicated the presence of a drug that could have incapacitated Woolmer.

An employee who answered the phone at the laboratory's headquarters in Birmingham, England, after business hours said nobody was available to comment.

The BBC's Panorama program did not identify the drug or the source of its information, and said toxicology tests were due to be given to Jamaican police next week.

In London, Scotland Yard said it has no information and that the investigation and all inquiries are being handled by police in Jamaica.

Shields has 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.

In an earlier interview with AP Television News, Shields said reported friction over religion in the Pakistan team was not a focus of the homicide probe.

“It doesn't feature in the investigation in any shape or form at the moment,” Shields said.

After powerhouse Pakistan's first-round ouster to Ireland, team spokesman Pervez Jamil Mir told an inquiry in Pakistan that some players were more focused on praying than playing.

Pervez also told APTN some players had been pressured to join in Muslim prayers.

“There are players who have complained to me that they're forced into saying their prayers and there are players who say that they want to come back and relax and do their stuff and they're not allowed to do that,” Pervez said in the interview on April 21 in Springfield, Va.

“When there's time for prayers, go and say your prayers, but don't force it to them,” Pervez told APTN.

Security video from the Kingston hotel where Woolmer died was sent to a laboratory in Britain for review. Some images of the footage were obtained by the BBC.

One image showed Woolmer, dressed in a white T-shirt, talking with two people as he headed to an elevator in the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, hours before he was killed in his room, the BBC said, and identified the two people as fans.

Woolmer, 58, was found unconscious in his room and within an hour declared dead in a hospital on March 18, the day after his squad was upset by Ireland and eliminated from the World Cup. Police said he was strangled.—AP