Monday, 04 October 2021 | TN Raghunatha | Mumbai
In a sensational development involving a first-ever raid on a rave party on a cruise ship on Saturday night, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on Sunday arrested Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s eldest son Aryan Khan and seven others and seized Cocaine and other synthetic drugs from the Goa-bound Cordelia Cruises’ Empress ship, off the Mumbai coast here.
Aryan and two others Arbaaz Seth Merchantt and Munmun Dhamecha — who were among the eight people detained from the ship — were on Sunday evening produced before a holiday court which remanded them in the NCB’s custody till October 5.
The five other people arrested by the NCB were Nupur Sarika, Ismeet Singh, Mohak Jaswal, Vikrant Chhoker and Gomit Chopra.
Twenty-three-year-old Aryan had his schooling from London’s Sevenoaks, graduated from the University of Southern California earlier this year and aspires to become a film director, while Arbaaz Seth Merchantt is a very close friend of both Aryan and his sister Suhana Khan. Not much is known about Munmun Dhamecha. The were detained and questioned by the NCB officials for several hours at their office at Ballard Estate in south Mumbai. Then they were taken into formal custody. The investigators seized 13 grams of cocaine, five grams of MD (Mephedrone), 21 grams of Charas, 22 pills of MDMA (Ecstasy) and `1.33 lakh in cash. All the eight accused will be produced before the court on Monday after their medical examination. During the course of questioning, the investigators also examined the WhatsApp chats in the mobile phones of Aryan and the other detained persons linking them to their alleged drug peddlers.
Aryan has been booked under Sections 8(C) read with 20, 35 and 27 of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.
The Section 8 (c) of NDPS Act invoked against Merchantt and Dhamecha deals with alleged possession and consumption of drugs. This Section also deals with production, manufacture, sale, transport and storage of the drugs. If offence under 20 (b) is proved, it will involve an imprisonment of 10 years and a fine of `1 lakh, while the Section 35 deals with presumption of culpable mental state of the accused.
Since Aryan has been charged with the consumption of drugs, the offence involves consumption of a small quantity of drugs.
