Aryan Khan, son of actor Shah Rukh Khan and producer Gauri Khan, will be produced before a court in Mumbai on Thursday for bail in the case related to the seizure of drugs on board a cruise ship.
Khan was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on Sunday at around 2 pm after being interrogated over a rave party on a cruise ship. The agency raided the party on Saturday night based on a tip-off.
The NCB registered a case under several sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985, after officers seized 13 gm of cocaine, 21 gm of charas or hashish, 22 pills of MDMA (ecstasy), 5 gm mephedrone, and cash worth Rs 1.33 lakh at International Cruise Terminal, Green Gate Mumbai.
In the last court hearing on Monday, the NCB had asked for custody of Khan till October 11 based on the fact that it found WhatsApp chats of his containing discussions with drug peddlers. It also sought custody of Khan’s friends, Arbaz Merchant and Munmun Dhamecha, to investigate the links. The court had granted an extension on the trio’s custody till Thursday (October 7).
Khan’s lawyer, Satish Maneshinde, will apply for his bail once again on Thursday, possibly on the same grounds as before – that no illegal substances were found in Khan’s possession.
Meanwhile, according to a report in the Times of India, Merchant has denied that any contraband was seized from him or “his shoe” as alleged by the NCB, and that a “false case has been foisted” on him. Along with his bail application, he has also applied separately for access to the CCTV footage of the raid.
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So far, the NCB has arrested 18 persons in relation to this case. The latest arrests happened late Tuesday night, when the agency detained a drug peddler, and on Wednesday, when an unnamed foreign national was caught with a commercial quantity of mephedrone (MD).
Here’s the full timeline of the events that led up to Aryan Khan’s arrest and what followed.