Rhea’s advocate seeks reopening of NCB probe into drug charges
MUMBAI : The advocate for actor Rhea Chakraborty, who was arrested on drug-related charges in 2020, sought a re-opening of investigation by the Narcotics Control Bureau (Mumbai zone) conducted in the past three years.
Satish Maneshinde, who also represented Aryan Khan — the 24-year-old son of Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan, who was arrested in the high-profile Cordelia drug bust case last October — said that many such “Bollywood youngsters” had been summoned by the NCB but “nobody knows for what.”
Aryan was among six persons exonerated by the agency as it filed charges in a Mumbai court on Friday.
Of the 20 persons arrested by the NCB in the cruise-ship drug case, the agency filed cases against 14.
Chakraborty came under the NCB scanner after an investigation into actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death by suicide purportedly revealed a trail of WhatsApp chats pertaining to the sale
and purchase of drugs. She was arrested on September 8, 2020, four days after brother, Showik, was apprehended.
The siblings were booked by the NCB for consumption, possession, illicit trafficking among other sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985.
The probe in Aryan Khan’s case has exposed the way several such cases under the NDPS Act were dealt with by the NCB, Maneshinde said.
“She was neither a consumer nor was anything recovered from her,” the lawyer said. “There is no evidence against her, apart from the WhatsApp messages which had no corroboration. They booked her on the bases of some random entries of payment which had no corroboration.”