Narcotics Control Bureau’s (NCB) deputy director general (DDG) for north region, Gyaneshwar Singh, recently claimed in his affidavit before the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) that he had never instructed then Mumbai zonal director Sameer Wankhede how to proceed with the Cordelia cruise drug bust case in which actor Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan was arrested along with several others.
“The said job was completely done by Wankhede and his team and to say that he (Singh) instructed Wankhede on the conduct of the case will be totally irrelevant and illegal and having no basis,” Singh said in his response to Wankhede’s plea that had challenged departmental proceedings.
Wankhede annexed Singh’s affidavit in his recent petition to the Delhi high court in which the IRS officer cited Singh, two other DDGs, and the then DG as his then superiors and claimed that he had kept them in the loop over the drug bust probe. However, he withdrew his petition later.
Singh had led the NCB’s special enquiry team (SET) to probe the alleged irregularities committed by Wankhede in the high-profile case. In fact, the SET findings were the basis of a corruption case the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed on May 11 against Wankhede and four others.
The affidavit said, “During my five-day visit to Mumbai, starting October 6, 2021, I had found material discrepancies in the conduct of the drug bust case and had thereafter alerted the then NCB chief about them.”
On October 9, 2021, Singh said he had issued a “supervisory note” to Wankhede which contained his observations. “The observations were mostly on further scientific- and evidence-based investigation, examination of witnesses, identifying gangs, networks, etc. The directions issued vide the above note were directory in nature and no enquiry had been done on the action suggested in the said note.”
Singh said he had left for Delhi on October 9 and apprised the then NCB DG of the material discrepancies through a letter dated October 12 since October 10 and 11 were holidays on account of being Saturday and Sunday.
“The letter showed that even till then he had given no directions to conduct the case probe in a particular way, as is being claimed by Wankhede,” the affidavit said.
The affidavit further said the WhatsApp chats containing conversations between the IRS officer and his superiors related to the drug case, which Wankhede had cited, were “merely an action of seeking information by the NCB headquarters” as Wankhede was physically present on the spot in Mumbai and hence reliance was on him to provide the right information.
When contacted, Wankhede told HT that his superiors indeed gave him instructions and did not merely take information related to the case from him. “If there were discrepancies, they should have pointed those out in the supervisory note.”
On October 2, 2021, a team from the NCB’s Mumbai zonal unit carried out a search on the Goa-bound Cordelia and arrested Aryan Khan, his friend Arbaaz Merchant, and others, including two women. The NCB claimed that it had seized some narcotics as well. In May 2022, the NCB gave a clean chit to Aryan and five others.
The NCB set up the SET after Prabhakar Sail, a panch witness, claimed that then NCB officers tried to extort ₹25 crore from Shah Rukh Khan for letting off his son. In an affidavit, Sail, who worked as a driver for K P Gosavi, another witness in the NCB case and one of the accused in the CBI case, alleged that he had overheard telephonic conversations between Gosavi and another person discussing a ₹25-crore deal. Sail died of a heart attack in April 2022.
The CBI on May 11 registered an FIR against Wankhede, Vishwa Vijay Singh, then NCB superintendent, and Ashish Ranjan, then intelligence officer of the NCB’s Mumbai zonal unit, and private individuals Gosavi, Sanville D’Souza, and some unknown persons under the Indian Penal Code and the Prevention of Corruption Act.