Hello Mumbai City Desk :

Aryan Khan has been released from Arthur Road Jail after 26 days following Bombay High Court having granted bail to him and two other accused in the mid-sea raid aboard Mumbai Cruiser drug case.

Now in a new development, NCB has come under fresh fire over its dealing with drug-peddling charges. Reportedly, a number of related cases were probed by it over one year. As per a new recent media report claim NCB has initiated only as many as five drugs-related cases in a year, with only one witness.

Meanwhile,.Adil Fazal Usmani. has been produced by NBC as ‘panch witness’ even as investigating all of them.

Reliable sources reveal that NCB has been using Usmani, one among the 10 panch witnesses cited by the agency in the cruise ship raid that figured Aryan Khan in at least five drugs-related cases since 2020.

Newspaper reports reveals
records seen by it, that Usmanii, a resident of the Jogeshwari area in Mumbai, was cited by the NCB as a panch witness in these five cases – two of them in 2020 and three in 2021.

Besides Usmani, two other panch witnesses cited by the NCB reportedly include Kiran Gosavi and Manish Bahubali.

Gosavi has demanded ₹50 lakh from an individual after the raid at the cruise ship though he denies such allegations.

Even Prabhakar Sail, too, has been listed as one of the 10 panch witnesses in the Mumbai cruise case. The other six, apart from Usmani, Gosavi, Bahubali, and Sail are – Aparna Rane, Prakash Bahadur, Shoaib Faiz, Aubrey Gomez, Muzammil Ibrahim, and V Waigankar.

A few of these people, , are security staff in the Cordelia cruise luxury liner from which Aryan Khan and others were held during the drugs bust on October 2.

A controversy erupted after Prabhakar Sail, one of the witnesses cited by the NCB for the raid, filed an affidavit sworn before a notary on October 23 alleging that he overheard his former employer Kiran Gosavi, also a witness in the Aryan Khan-cruise drug case, talking to a person about settling the matter for ₹18 crore and that amount of ₹8 crore would be required to be paid to NCB official Sameer Wankhede.

Aryan Khan, his friend Arbaaz Merchant and model Munmun Dhamecha were arrested by a team led by Sameer Wankhede on October 3 after a raid on a cruise ship have all been in custody for 26 days.

News input: K.V.Raman