New Delhi: He is an honest man and one so feared that he could “sober up the alcoholics and drug addicts” – that is how former zonal director of Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) is described in an undated video which has since gone viral.
Today, officer Sameer Wankhede – who burst into public space after the arrest of Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan in a drugs bust case in October 2021 — is facing allegations of corruption and criminal misconduct.
Wankhede is accused by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) of trying to extort Rs 25 crore from the Khan family, and another Rs 50 lakh to get Aryan off the hook.
The video, which has garnered 10 million views, shows a reporter from Sach Tak News introducing the former NCB officer with glowing words.
The CBI, in a first information report (FIR), revealed that two independent witnesses in the Aryan Khan drugs case had planned to wrest Rs 25 crore from Khan who was arrested on charges of alleged possession of narcotic substances in 2021. The two independent witnesses named were Kiran Gosavi and Prabhakar Sail.
Actor Shah Rukh Khan and his family were threatened that his son Aryan would be framed if they did not pay up, as per the FIR against Wankhede in the drugs-on-cruise case.
Aryan Khan was arrested in the alleged drug bust case on the Cordelia cruise ship on 2 October, 2021.
In the FIR, the CBI has also brought up the officer’s foreign trips and his love for expensive wrist watches. It says that Wankhede and Ashish Ranjan, then an intelligence officer with the NCB, “could not sufficiently justify their acquired assets as per their declared income”. Wankhede, it adds, has “not properly explained his foreign visits and had apparently mis-declared the expenditure on his foreign travels”, NDTV reported.
The former zonal director gave allowed a “free hand” to independent witness Gosavi to give the impression that Gosavi was an NCB officer, according to the FIR filed last week, Hindustan Times reported.
Additionally, it was revealed that Wankhede’s team changed the original raid information report, and that searches on people were not documented, while some suspects were allowed to walk-free.
Following his arrest, Aryan Khan spent 22 days in jail before the NCB cleared him of charges, citing a “lack of sufficient evidence”. Amid the uproar, a separate probe was launched into the allegations against Wankhede and his team.