Ahead of the Bombay High Court hearing, IRS officer Sameer Wankhede, the former Mumbai Zonal Director of Narcotics Control Bureau, said here on Monday that he would seek special security from the Mumbai Police owing to threats to his life.
Wankhede, presently embroiled in an alleged extortion case pertaining to the sensational raid aboard the Cordelia Cruise ship in which Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan's son Aryan was among those arrested, said in a brief interaction with private Marathi TV channels.
He said that he has been getting many threats, including on social media and would soon meet the Mumbai Commissioner of Police with a request to the effect.
Wankhede said he has been raising the issue of the risks he faces several times in the past, particularly now, after the CBI lodged the FIR against him.
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The IRS officer was grilled for two days, almost five hours daily, as per the high court directives of last Friday, by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
At the last hearing, the Bombay High Court granted relief from any coercive action till May 22 to Wankhede, an IRS officer of 2008 batch, whose role during the Cordelia Cruise ship raids on October 2, 2021 has come under the radar of the CBI.
It may be recalled that ex-Maha Vikas Aghadi government minister and Nationalist Congress Party leader Nawab Malik, and a witness in the cruise raids Prabhakar Sail (who died last year) had levelled several allegations of corruption against Wankhede and the raid team.
However, Wankhede has stoutly denied all the allegations against him and expressed his full faith in the judiciary, the Central government and the CBI to give him justice.
Thereafter, Wankhede was relieved from the cruise raid case and later an internal probe was conducted vis-A-vis the allegations he faced, even as the NCB gave a 'clean chit' to Aryan Khan for lack of evidence against him in May 2022.
Besides Wankhede, the CBI has booked two other NCB officers, Vishwa Vijay Singh and Ashish Ranjan, and witnesses in the ship case, K.P. Gosavi and Sanvile D'Souza.
--IANS
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