Shankar Raj / Bengaluru
After remaining in the drug racket radar for a couple of days, Sandalwood actor Sanjana Galrani was on Tuesday arrested by the Central Crime Bureau and a local court remanded her in 5-day police custody. Prior to her arrest, a CCB team searched her residence at the posh Indiranagar. It was the arrest of her friend Rahul Shetty that led cops to Sanjana’s flat. According to the police, Rahul was involved in ensuring celebrity presence in high-profile parties and procuring drugs for them.
Rahul and Sanjana, along with another Mangaluru-based party planner Pruthvi Shetty, were running an event management company. Police said the parties organised by the firm were a hotspot of drug consumption and sales. Police arrested another high-profile party planner Viren Khanna, alleged drug peddlers Loum Pepper Samba, Rahul Tonse, Prashanth Ranka and Niyaz. The police are still looking for Vivek Oberoi’s brother-in-law, Aditya Alva, named as ‘accused number 6’ in the case. The prime accused and Ragini Dwivedi’s long-time friend Shiva Prakash is yet to be arrested.
Sanjana is the second actor to be arrested after Ragini Dwivdi, her colleague in the Sandalwood industry, who was arrested on Friday.
Sanjana is a multilingual actor who has acted in over 45 films, predominantly in Kannada and Telugu. Her younger sister, Nikki Galrani, also an actor, has acted in over 25 Tamil and Malayalam movies.
Meanwhile, the police have intensified the crackdown on narcotics trade in the past week and found that food and product delivery boys were used as drug mules.
On Monday, the police arrested two delivery agents of two hyper-local logistics companies for their alleged involvement in the drug-supply racket. Taking advantage of the fact that food and product delivery boys would not be checked by the police teams patrolling the streets, a few drug traffickers used these delivery boys to supply drugs to their clients. While many camouflaged the products as medicines, a few made extra payments to the delivery boys.
The delivery boys, who used to earn Rs40 per delivery, were offered Rs500 per delivery by the accused.
Probe will cover coastal dists: DGP
The ongoing investigation into the drug dealings by a mafia gang in the state will not be confined to Bengaluru and will be extended to coastal districts, Karnataka DGP Praveen Sood said on Tuesday. Addressing reporters at Udupi after a meeting on drug menace at the office of the police superintendent, he said the probe is also covering districts including Belagavi, Hubballi and Chitradurga. Sood said the state will be adopting a zero tolerance in drug-related cases.
