New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has booked Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) former Mumbai Zonal director Sameer Wankhede, who headed the Cordelia Cruise ship probe against Aryan Khan, in a case of corruption for allegedly demanding a bribe to “settle the case”, ThePrint has learnt.
Besides Wankhede, two other NCB officers — S.P. Vishwa Vijay Singh and Ashish Ranjan — along with independent witness Kiran Gosavi, who was also present at the raid, were named in the FIR.
According to a source in the CBI, the case was registered after a detailed inquiry carried out by the Vigilance unit of the NCB against the officers. A report was submitted by the unit to the Centre for further action.
“A case under relevant sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act and for criminal conspiracy has been registered against the accused. We will be looking at several observations that the Vigilance department has made against the errant officers,” a CBI source said.
On 2 October 2021, a team led by Wankhede carried out a raid on the Cordelia cruise at the International Cruise Terminal at Green Gate, Mumbai. The NCB seized 13 grams of cocaine, five grams of mephedrone, 21 grams of marijuana, 22 pills of MDMA (Ecstasy), and Rs 1.33 lakh in cash from the cruise vessel, following which 14 people were arrested.
Initially, the NCB investigated the case but after certain “irregularities” surfaced, it was transferred to a Special Investigation Team (SIT) in NCB headquarters, Delhi. The SIT took over the probe on 6 November that year.
A witness on the cruise ship, Prabhakar Sail had alleged that NCB demanded Rs 25 crore to let off Aryan, the son of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan.
A five-member vigilance probe team, including Deputy Director General Gyaneshwar Singh, then went to Mumbai to begin the departmental inquiry and collected some documents and recordings from the NCB office at Ballard Estate in south Mumbai.
Subsequently, in May 2022, the NCB gave a clean chit to Aryan, eight months after he was arrested for the alleged procurement and consumption of drugs for a “rave party” onboard the cruise ship.
NCB officers had told ThePrint that Aryan was not found in possession of any drugs and his WhatsApp chats, which were initially treated as crucial evidence, were not indicative of him being part of any international drug trafficking racket.
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No medical examination, no seizures
What gave Aryan a clean chit was that in the initial probe, no medical examination was carried out to check for consumption of drugs. Moreover, no seizure memo to show that Aryan’s phone had been seized was put on record.
According to sources in the NCB, Aryan’s statements during the investigation revealed that he had bought and consumed weed as a student in Los Angeles, for “recreational purpose”.
There are also WhatsApp chats that indicate that he consumed hash and weed in the past, but nothing concrete was found on the consumption of the drug that was recovered in the raid carried out at the cruise ship, the sources said.
Senior officials associated with the probe also observed that Wankhede appeared to have been “motivated to somehow implicate Aryan”.
Professional journey
Wankhede started his career with a posting in the Intelligence Bureau in Andhra Pradesh in 2006, after which he was posted in Delhi.
In the past, while serving in the Customs department, Wankhede had detained actors Minissha Lamba and Anushka Sharma at the Mumbai airport, for allegedly not declaring that they were carrying gold and diamond-studded jewellery.
Within 10 days of Wankhede joining the NCB, the agency arrested actor Rhea Chakraborty and her brother Showik in September 2020, in connection with a drugs angle in the Sushant Singh Rajput death case.
The officer was again in the spotlight for busting an alleged rave party on a Goa-bound cruise-liner and arresting Aryan, among others.
Wankhede became the subject of controversy after a witness in the NCB’s alleged Aryan Khan drug bust case claimed he was made to sign on a blank paper and claimed that there were talks of a payoff worth crores, with Wankhede as one of the beneficiaries.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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