A foreign national has been intercepted in the Mumbai cruise drugs case and will be produced in court on Friday, said NCB director Sameer Wankhede. He added that the agency still has six months to investigate the matter as so far only a case had been registered against the eight accused.
A Nigerian national, Chinedu Igwe, was arrested from suburban Andheri in connection with alleged seizure of drugs from a Goa-bound cruise ship off the Mumbai coast. An NCB official said that 40 tablets of Ecstasy were found from his possession. It took the number of arrested persons in the case — which includes Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan — to 18.
Wankhede also lauded his team’s performance in the last one year. “If you see in last one year or so we have registered over 100 cases, including work done by NCB teams in Maharashtra and Goa. We have made over 300 arrests, many of them are peddlers caught with commercial quantity, taken action against organised gangs who had set up its manufacturing units and mini labs in the heart of Mumbai,” he told CNN-News18.
The latest high-profile seizure of banned drugs from a cruise ship off the Mumbai coast has once against brought the Narcotics Control Bureau in the spotlight. And allegations of “targeting” Bollywood aren’t far away months after it investigated alleged drug abuse in the fraternity in connection with the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput.
Questions have been raised in particular over the arrest and subsequent three-day custody of Aryan Khan, the son of superstar Shah Rukh Khan, despite no drugs found on him during Saturday’s raid on the Goa-bound ship of the Cordelia Cruises company. The NCB recovered 11 grams of charas from the remaining two accused, Arbaaz Merchant and Munmun Dhamecha. The bail plea of all three was rejected on Monday.
Since September last year, the NCB has registered 114 cases under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and arrested more than 300 people, including 34 foreigners and a few names from the Bollywood. In all, drugs worth more than Rs 150 crore have been recovered from Mumbai, adjoining Navi Mumbai, Thane and other parts of Maharashtra.
The man leading the charge is NCB zonal director Sameer Wankhede and he categorically denied that the agency is specifically ‘targeting’ Bollywood.
Last Tuesday, he said that “shaming” Bollywood is not the NCB’s agenda, but added that anyone found on the wrong side of law won’t be spared.
“I would not like to quote or pinpoint a particular case. All cases are important to us. All angles are important to us, including the financial one. We are taking action down to the peddler-level. We came to know that this (drug abuse) is a deep-rooted problem in Mumbai and Goa. We are fortunate to work for the NCB. It’s a national service, it’s an issue of national interest. We will fight it till the end,” Wankhede said.
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