A magistrate court has sent three of those recently arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), which is investigating the drugs angle in actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death case, to the central agency’s custody till Wednesday.
The magistrate sent Karamjeet Singh, Ankush Arneja and Antony Dwayne Fernandes to NCB’s custody till Wednesday. Sanket Patel, Sandeep Gupta and Aftab Ansari have been sent to judicial custody.
The agency, seeking custodial interrogation of Singh, Arneja and Fernandes, told the court that they are connected with personalities in the Bollywood film industry and that it has booked them under Section 27A, as it found them indulging in financing illicit trafficking of drugs and harbouring offenders.
Special Public Prosecutor Atul Sarpande, appearing for NCB, further told the court that 44 gm charas and Rs 6 lakh in cash was recovered from Singh and over Rs 1 lakh in cash, 17 gm ganja and seven grams charas was recovered from Arneja. The agency also told the court, where they were produced through video conference, that these accused had links with the other co-accused.
After six days in NCB’s custody, another co-accused in the case Anuj Keswani was sent to judicial custody by a special NDPS court after being produced through video conference. Advocate Trivankumar Karnani, who represented Keswani, said that Keswani has been made a scapegoat among other high profile accused due to media frenzy in the case. NCB had claimed it had recovered LSD from him in commercial quantity. The advocate said that the quantity of the drug can be ascertained only after the substance undergoes forensic chemical analysis and that the quantity has been exaggerated by the agency without analysis.
