Mumbai drugs case: NCB has not cleared charges against Aryan Khan, says senior official

The Narcotics Control Bureau, or NCB, has not cleared charges against actor Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan in the Mumbai cruise ship drugs case, a senior official from the agency said.

“Media reports suggesting that the NCB had given Aryan Khan a clean chit are speculative and the investigation against him is still ongoing,” the NCB’s Deputy Director General (operations) Sanjay Kumar Singh told Scroll.in.

Earlier this week, several media reports had said that the NCB’s Special Investigation Team had not found any evidence that Khan was part of an international drug trafficking syndicate.

However, Singh said that such statements had not been cross-checked with the agency before being published, according to PTI. “Investigation is not yet completed and it is premature to say anything at this stage,” said the official, who is heading the Special Investigation Team in the case.

Aryan Khan, his friend Arbaaz Merchant, model Munmum Dhamecha and five other persons had been detained by the NCB 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.

On October 28, the Bombay High Court granted bail to Khan, Merchant and Dhamecha, and observed that there was no evidence of a conspiracy among them.

The court said that merely because the three were travelling on the same cruise, that by itself “cannot be a foundation for the charge of conspiracy against them”.

The order also said that Aryan Khan had not carried any drugs during the raid, despite the NCB claiming in October that he had been found in “conscious possession” of contraband substances. The agency had also accused Aryan Khan of trying to deal in a commercial quantity of drugs.