By Kalash Khurana Last Updated:
Tagged as 'super cop', the NCB zonal director, Sameer Wankhede, has been hitting the headlines ever since the arrest of Shah Rukh Khan's son, Aryan Khan. He is the lead investigator of the high-profile cruise drug case and has been under the radar for many controversies ever since he had busted the case. Moreover, Sameer is also the man behind the investigation of the late actor, Sushant Singh Rajput's drug case.
However, Sameer Wankhede has become a target of a lot of hatred after the reports of him being a part of alleged bribery in Aryan Khan's case surfaced online. According to reports, Sameer was reportedly involved in a Rs. 25 crores deal in Aryan Khan's case after one of NCB's independent witnesses accused him of taking Rs. 8 crores as bribery in the high profile cruise drug bust. On October 27, 2020, the Mumbai Police had appointed an ACP-level officer to investigate the allegations levelled against Sameer Wankhede.
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A decade ago, Sameer Wankhede was the assistant commissioner of customs stationed at the Mumbai airport. He had acted against many Bollywood celebrities when he was handling customs, service tax and narcotics operations at Mumbai airport. The list of celebrities detained by him includes Anushka Sharma, Katrina Kaif, Ranbir Kapoor, Mika Singh, Bipasha Basu, Anurag Kashyap, Rhea Chakraborty, Deepika Padukone, Shraddha Kapoor, Sara Ali Khan and many more.
And hence, this is not the first time that he crossed paths with the Badshah of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan. It so happened in 2011, when Sameer Wankhede had stopped Shah Rukh Khan at the Mumbai airport when the actor had arrived after spending a family vacation in Holland and London. During that time, Wankhede was the assistant commissioner of customs at Mumbai airport and had questioned the actor for several hours for carrying extra luggage. Moreover, Shah Rukh's luggage was checked by Wankhede’s team for possible evasion of duty.
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Soon after Aryan Khan’s arrest, there were rumours that the investigating agency was targeting Shah Rukh Khan. However, Sameer Wankhede had quashed the allegations and had told ETimes:
“We are not targeting anyone at all. We have nothing against him. We have arrested more than 300 people in the last 10 months. Out of those, at the most, there would be about 4 to 5 known people. How can you say that we are targeting anyone? Most of those arrested in the last one year are hard-core, drug related criminals.”
Meanwhile, Wankhede is facing a slew of allegations and corruption charges as Maharashtra minister and Nationalist Congress Party leader, Nawab Malik, had accused him of using a fake caste certificate to get a government job under reserved quota. Malik also stated that he had received a letter from an anonymous NCB official stating that Wankhede had framed innocent people in 26 fake drug cases.
For the unversed, in the last hearing, Aryan Khan's custody under the NCB was extended till October 30, 2021.
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