For more than four hours on Wednesday, Narcotics Control Bureau’s (NCB) Mumbai zonal director Sameer Wankhede answered a barrage of questions posed by a vigilance team headed by Deputy Director General (northern region) Gyaneshwar Singh in connection with the departmental inquiry into allegations of extortion in the drugs-on-cruise case in which Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan was arrested earlier this month. Singh said that Wankhede will continue leading the case until ‘substantial information’ is found against him.
The officer was quizzed on the minutest details of the high-profile case – from the process he followed before and after the raid to the informers and sources he used to get the tip-off of the alleged rave party. Wankhede’s statement was recorded at the NCB’s office in Ballard Estate in south Mumbai and the CRPF mess in suburban Bandra. Prabhakar Sail, a witness in the Aryan Khan case, had alleged that he had overheard his boss and another witness KP Gosavi speaking over the phone about the Rs 25 crore demand out of which “Rs 8 crore are to be given to Sameer Wankhede”.
Photos and videos of Gosavi with Aryan Khan have gone viral on social media and other news platforms.
CNN-News18 has accessed exclusive inside details of Wankhede’s grillings. The list of questions posed to Wankhede:
- Why and how did he narrow down the list of detainees to only seven people out of the 1200 people onboard the cruise ship?
- What were the credentials of his sources and informers?
- Did he verify the information through some other sources?
- Why was custody access given to a third party? (Photo of KP Gosavi, a witness in the case, posing with Aryan Khan in detention went viral)
- Why didn’t he follow the custody protection protocol?
- Wankhede was also point-blank asked about the bribe allegations.
“It’s difficult to say right now if he is speaking the truth. The assessment of his statement and concluding the inquiry will take some time,” a top source in the central agency told CNN-News18.
The five-member NCB team, which landed in Mumbai from Delhi on Wednesday morning, also collected some crucial documents of the case from the (western) zone office.
Wankhede, who is leading the probe in the cruise drugs case, visited the NCB’s headquarters in New Delhi on Tuesday and spent over two hours. Sources earlier said the inquiry will also look at the aspect of Gosavi who was spotted near Aryan Khan after the raids, and the procedures followed by the sleuths while entrusting the custody of all the accused arrested on October 3 from the international cruise terminal in Mumbai.
The role of all the officers and witnesses involved in the case will be probed and it will be recorded if they followed the NCB manual and procedures mentioned in the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act during such operations, sources said.
Wankhede on Sunday wrote to Mumbai Police commissioner Hemant Nagrale, seeking protection from likely legal action “being planned” against him by unknown persons to falsely frame him concerning an alleged vigilance-related issue. On Monday, he failed to get any relief related to an affidavit on the sensational extortion claims made by Sail, with a special court saying it cannot pass a blanket order barring courts from taking cognisance of the document.
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