Sameer Wankhede's foreign visits, expensive watches under CBI scanner in Aryan Khan case

Foreign visits undertaken by former NCB officer Sameer Wankhede, booked by the CBI over an alleged Rs 25-crore bribe demand from superstar Shah Rukh Khan's family to spare his son in a drugs case, will be under the scanner of the agency, officials said.

Narcotics Control Bureau's Special Enquiry Team (SET) had red-flagged alleged improper explanations and apparent misdeclaration of the expenditure given by then NCB Zonal Director Wankhede on his foreign visits.

He has also not declared the source of his foreign visits properly. It was also found that Wankhede has indulged himself in sale and purchase of expensive wrist watches with a private entity, Viral Rajan, without intimating the department (present or parent), the SET said in the findings which are now part of the FIR.

The details of FIR made public on Monday show that independent witness K P Gosavi and one Prabhakar Sail, now deceased, were included by the NCB in the Cordelia cruise ship drug raid on October 2, 2021 on the directions of Wankhede.

Gosavi in conspiracy with his aide Sanvile D'Souza and others had entered into the conspiracy to extort an amount of Rs 25 crore from the family members of Aryan, son of Shah Rukh Khan, by threatening them of the accusation of offences of possession of Narcotics substances.

In order to let him walk free, Gosavi and D'Souza negotiated the amount bringing it down to Rs 18 crore and even collected a token of Rs 50 lakh and returned a part of the amount later, the FIR alleged.

Aryan Khan, who was formally arrested by the NCB on October 3, 2021 after a raid on the Cordelia cruise ship a day before, was granted bail by the Bombay High Court on October 28 after he had spent 25 days in jail. But his name was not included in the list of accused in the NCB charge sheet for a lack of evidence.

Wankhede in the capacity of the immediate supervisory officer had directed to take Gosavi and Prabhakar Sail as the independent witness in the proceedings against the accused in the drug bust case, the FIR states.