Mumbai: A Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) team reached actress Rhea Chakraborty’s home in Mumbai on Sunday morning to serve her summons for joining probe in the drugs case linked to the death of her live-in partner and actor Sushant Singh Rajput, officials said.
The agency has said that it wants to question Rhea, 28, the main accused in the death case, to take the probe forward in the case.
“The team has gone to serve the summons for joining investigation. She(Rhea) can come on her own or she can come with the team,” a senior official of the federal anti-narcotics agency said.
A team led by NCB joint director Sameer Wankhede reached Rhea’s house located in Santa Cruz (west) area accompanied by local police and some women personnel.
The team left after some time and it is expected that Rhea will appear before the agency later in the day, they said.
“We have summoned her. She will come respecting the summons,” Wankhede told reporters outside the NCB office in Ballard Estate after he returned from Rhea’s house.
The agency has said it also wants to confront Rhea with Showik, Miranda and Sawant in order to ascertain their individual roles in this alleged drug racket after it obtained mobile phone chat records and other electronic data that suggested some banned drugs were allegedly being procured by these people.
Rhea, in interviews given to multiple TV news channels, has said that she has never consumed drugs herself.
She had, however, claimed that the late actor used to consume marijuana.
The NCB, over the last two days, has arrested her younger brother Showik Chakraborty (24), Rajput’s house manager Samuel Miranda (33) and Dipesh Sawant, a member of the actor’s personal staff, in this case.
It is claimed that Miranda told NCB investigators that he used to procure bud or curated marijuana for the late actor’s household.
Sawant was arrested on Saturday and he is expected to be produced by the agency before a local court on Sunday for seeking his custody.
A total of 8 people have been arrested till now by the NCB with six being directly linked to this probe while two were arrested by it when probe was launched under criminal sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.
Also read: Rhea’s brother Showik, two Sushant staffers ‘confess to arranging drugs for actor’, says NCB
When the probe in the case began, the agency had arrested two men, Abbas Lakhani and Karan Arora, for alleged drug peddling and officials have claimed that through them they reached Zaid Vilatra and Abdel Basit Parihar who are allegedly linked to this drugs case as they were in touch with Miranda.
Miranda, they had said, used to allegedly procure drugs from them on the purported instructions of Showik, agency officials said.
Both Lakhani and Arora have been granted bail. The NCB had said it recovered 59 grams of cannabis from them.
The NCB, while seeking remand of one of the accused in this case few days back, had told a local court that it was looking into “the drug citadel in Mumbai, and especially Bollywood” in this probe.
This case has given the NCB an “inkling” into the narcotics network and its penetration in Bollywood or Hindi movie industry, NCB Deputy Director General Mutha Ashok Jain told reporters outside the agency’s office on Saturday.
Various angles surrounding the death of the 34-year-old actor are being probed by three federal agencies, including the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
The NCB initiated a drug angle probe in this case after the ED shared with it a report following the cloning of two mobile phones of Rhea.
Rajput was found dead at his flat in suburban Bandra area on June 14.
Also Read: Against the 1000 questions TV news had after Sushant Singh’s death, we have just six
This is just the start of a major clean up. The big fish are next.