Mumbai Police Orders Probe Against NCB Officer Sameer Wankhede; KP Gosavi Arrested By Pune Police

The Mumbai Police has appointed a four-member team to investigate the extortion allegations levelled against the Narcotics Control Bureau's Zonal Director Sameer Wankhede.

The Joint Commissioner of Police Vishwas Nangre Patil issued the order on Wednesday directing Additional Commissioner of Police (ACP) Dilip Sawant to supervise the probe.

The official order states that four separate complaints of bribery have been filed at the MRA Marg Police Station against NCB's Zonal Director Sameer Wankhede by – a crucial witness in the NCB case - Prabhakar Sail, Advocate Sudha Dwivedi, and two other individuals, Kanishk Jain & Nitin Deshmukh.

Read details of Dwivedi's complaint first published by Live Law.

The allegations of extortion originated from a notarizedaffidavit of panch witness Prabhakar Sail. According to NCB, Sail is witness to the raid and alleged seizure of 6 grams of charas from Aryan Khan's friend – Arbaaz. Khan and Arbaaz were apprehended together.

However, in his affidavit Sail alleged that on the intervening night of October 2-3 he was called to the NCB office and was asked by Sameer Wakhende to sign as a panch witness of the case and his signature was taken on 10 blank papers.

Sail was the personal bodyguard of KP Gosavi, a private detective, whose picture with Khan went viral on the internet.

Sail claimed in the affidavit that he overheard Gosavi telling one Sam D'Souza that "you put a bomb of Rs 25 crores, let's settle for Rs 18 crores because we have to give 8 crores to Sameer Wankhede." This was after Gosavi left the NCB office on October 3.

He claimed a few minutes later he saw Pooja Dadlani (Shah Rukh Khan's manager) talking to KP Gosavi. Sail added that later Gosavi asked him to go to a location and collect Rs 50 lakhs cash. He says he collected two bags of cash and delivered it to Gosavi.

Meanwhile, an NCB team from Delhi is conducting their internal inquiry into the allegations by Sail. They questioned Wankhede for over 4 hours on Wednesday.

In a related development, the Pune Police confirmed today morning that it has arrested KP Gosavi in an earlier fraud case, in which he had been absconding.