Narcotics Control Bureau zonal director Sameer Wankhede’s father, Dhyandev Wankhede, has filed a defamation suit against Maharashtra minister Nawab Malik in the Bombay High Court, Live Law reported on Sunday.
Dhyandev Wankhede has sought Rs 1.25 crore in damages. He said that Malik, through press releases, interviews and Twitter, has made “tortious and defamatory remarks” against his son.
The comments, Dhyandev Wankhede claimed, had caused “irreparable loss, damage, harm, prejudice to the name, character, reputation and societal image of plaintiff and his family members”.
The officer’s father requested the court for permanent injunction restraining Malik and his party members from publishing or writing defamatory write-ups about Sameer Wankhede and his family. Dhyandev Wankhede also requested deletion of articles, tweets, interviews and social media posts against his family.
In the past few days, Malik has levelled a number of allegations against Wankhede, who had been investigating the Mumbai cruise ship drug case involving Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan until Friday. Malik had claimed that Wankhede used forged documents to get his job under the Scheduled Caste quota and that he had been illegally tapping phones.
He has also accused the Narcotics Control Bureau zonal director of being part of an extortion racket linked to drug cases against Bollywood actors. On Sunday, Malik said that Wankhede was part of a plan made by a Bharatiya Janata Party leader to kidnap Aryan Khan.
In his plea before the Bombay High Court, Dhyandev Wankhede’s counsel said that the defamatory comments against his son started when Malik’s son-in-law, Sameer Khan, was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau in January for allegedly trading drugs, The Indian Express reported.
The counsel also said his daughter Yasmin’s legal practice was affected by Malik’s claims of the family being a fraud and his questioning of their religious beliefs.
The High Court will hear the case on Monday, Live Law reported.
The Aryan Khan case
Aryan Khan and seven others had been detained by a team of Narcotics Control Bureau, led by Sameer Wankhede, after a raid on a cruise ship off the coast of Mumbai on October 2. During the raid, the agency claimed to have seized 13 grams of cocaine, 5 grams of mephedrone, 21 grams of charas, 22 pills of MDMA (ecstasy) and Rs 1.3 lakh from the ship.
No drugs were recovered from Aryan Khan. But, investigators have alleged that he is part of a larger conspiracy to procure drugs from an international network. The 23-year-old spent over three weeks in prison before getting bail in the case on October 28.
On Friday, a Special Investigation Team of the Narcotics Control Bureau, supervised by Sanjay Kumar Singh, deputy director general of the agency’s headquarters in Delhi, took over the investigation into the drugs case from Wankhede.
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