How a selfie to force Shah Rukh Khan to pay up in Aryan Khan drug case backfired

Mumbai: A selfie that went viral holds the key to the rogue drugs bust operation on the cruise ship, Cordelia, in October 2021. Following a vigilance report, the Central Bureau of Investigation filed an FIR last week against IRS officer Sameer Wankhede who was then the zonal director of Mumbai Narcotics Control Bureau, NCB Superintendent Vishwa Vijay Singh who has since been dismissed from service, NCB’s Intelligence officer Ashish Ranjan, and two private citizens, KP Gosavi and Sanville Adrian D’Souza.

The selfie shows Gosavi, who was a panch witness to the seizure of 6 grams of charas from Arbaaz Merchant on Cordelia, posing triumphantly with Aryan Khan. Moments before he posted the selfie online, news photographers recorded Gosavi driving Aryan Khan in his personal car and escorting him and Arbaaz Merchant into the NCB’s office at Ballard Estate.

It is the CBI’s case that the visuals of Gosavi handling Aryan Khan and the subsequent selfie were to create the impression that he was a part of the NCB while in actual fact he is deal maker who had a prior cheating case registered against him in Pune. Gosavi is known to Wankhede who was personally supervising the Cordelia operation. The CBI claims that the Mumbai NCB team wanted to extort ₹25 crore from Shah Rukh Khan to not book his son in the case, and that Gosavi was to be used for this purpose.

“The independent witness KP Gosavi was allowed to be present in the company of accused persons and even allowed to come to the NCB office which is against the norms,” say the FIR. “In this manner KP Gosavi clicked selfies and recorded the voice note of an accused. It was this position that allowed KP Gosavi and his aide Sanvile D’Souza amongst others to enter into the conspiracy to extort an amount of ₹25 crore from the family of the alleged ‘accused’ Aryan Khan.” The CBI FIR goes on name Wankhede and says he gave a free hand to Gosavi so that when he calls the Khan family to discuss the money they would pay heed.

However, Gosavi’s selfie boomeranged on the alleged conspirators. NCP leader Nawab Malik was the first to question Gosavi’s presence inside the NCB office. Malik who claimed his son-in-law too had been framed by the NCB, realized that it was most unusual for an officer from an investigating agency to take such photos and make them public, began his own investigation into the man in the selfie with Aryan Khan. In his first press briefing on October 6, 2021, the NCP leader revealed that Gosavi was not with the NCB, and was in fact an independent witness called by Wankhede. Malik also revealed that the second independent witness called by Wankhede was a certain Manish Bhanushali who was a Mumbai BJP worker and who claimed on camera that the NCB raid was on the basis of his tip off.

Malik’s revelations set off a chain of events which resulted in all charges being dropped against Aryan Khan though not before he had to spend nearly a month in jail. Subsequently, Gosavi’s driver Prabhakar Sail too filed an affidavit about the extortion plans allegedly hatched by Gosavi and Sameer Wankhede. Sail died of a heart attack shortly after his sensational revelations.