Urooj Khan
Urooj Khan won the $1 million in the lottery just weeks before he died suddenly of a heart attack in his West Rogers Park home last summer. Now, months after his death, Chicago police were conducting a homicide investigation after it was discovered that he had been poisoned. (January 7, 2013)
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By Jason Meisner and Jeremy Gorner Tribune reporters
6:22 p.m. CST, January 8, 2013

Cook County authorities investigating the cyanide-poisoning death of a Chicago man who had hit a lottery jackpot want to exhume his body to conduct an autopsy.In a telephone interview today with the Tribune, Medical Examiner Stephen J. Cina said he sent a sworn statement to prosecutors laying out why he wanted the body of Urooj Khan exhumed. The state’s attorney’s office is planning to file papers in civil court in coming days asking a judge to approve the exhumation of Khan’s remains, spokeswoman Sally Daly said.
As first reported by the Tribune in a front-page story Monday, Khan, 46, who owned a dry cleaning business on the city’s North Side, died suddenly last July just weeks after winning a million-dollar prize at a 7-Eleven store near his home. Finding no trauma to his body and no unusual substances in his blood, the medical examiner's office declared his death to be from natural causes and he was buried at Rosehill Cemetery without an autopsy.
About a week later, a relative told the medical examiner’s office to take a closer look at Khan’s death. By early December, comprehensive toxicology tests showed that Khan had died of a lethal amount of cyanide, prompting Chicago police and county prosecutors to investigate his homicide.
While a motive has not been determined yet, police haven't ruled out that Khan was killed because of his big lottery win, a law enforcement source told the Tribune. He died before he could collect the winnings – about $425,000 after taxes.
jmeisner@tribune.com
jgorner@tribune.com