Aryan Khan case: According to a senior NCB official, the vigilance division of the agency has discovered irregularities in the drug bust investigation on the Cordelia cruise ship, which was headed by the former zonal head of the agency, Sameer Wankhede, in October of last year and resulted in the arrest of actor Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan (24) and 19 other people.
A 3,000-page internal vigilance report “has been presented to NCB director general Satya Narayan Pradhan,” according to the bureau’s chief vigilance officer, deputy director general Gyaneshwar Singh.
But he steadfastly declined to reveal the investigation’s specifics or its findings.
On condition of anonymity, a senior bureau source stated that the study “suggested departmental action against at least seven NCB personnel.”
According to a second official, the vigilance department report was created after gathering the testimony of about 65 persons, including Pooja Dadlani, Shah Rukh Khan’s manager. The investigation into the cocaine raid and other cases looked into by Wankhede, who oversaw the agency’s Mumbai zonal office, were found to have significant procedural flaws.
The cruise ship Cordelia was raided on October 2, 2021, by Wankhede and a team of NCB agents. Twenty persons were detained, including Aryan Khan, who was imprisoned for 28 days before the Bombay high court granted him release.
Wankhede’s parent cadre, the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC), reassigned him to Chennai’s Director General of Taxpayers’ Services (DGTS) office in May.
After claims that attempts were made to extort money from Aryan Khan arose, a special investigation team (SIT) led by NCB’s then-DDG Sanjay Kumar Singh re-examined the whole case including the first arrests made by Wankhede’s squad. The Mumbai NCB team’s actions, according to the SIT, had several “severe irregularities,” and they reportedly just intended to “implicate” Aryans in this case.
Contrary to the claims made by NCB’s Mumbai section, HT had revealed in an exclusive story from March that one of the SIT’s primary conclusions was that Aryan Khan had never been in possession of any narcotics. So there was no need for him to check his chats on his phone. The conversations made no mention of Khan being a member of a global syndicate.
The narcotics seized from many accused people detained in the investigation were portrayed as a single recovery, and the search on the boat was not videotaped as required.
On the evening of October 2, Wankhede oversaw a team of law enforcement personnel and a few witnesses as they searched the cruise liner at Mumbai’s International Cruise Terminal at Green Gate. From the ship, it recovered 13 grammes of cocaine, 5 grammes of mephedrone, 21 grammes of marijuana, 22 MDMA (ecstasy) tablets, and 1.33 lakh in cash.
The NCB indicted 14 persons in the case and exonerated Aryan Khan and five others seven months after 20 people were detained.
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