Charges against Sameer Wankhede serious, preliminary probes must, says NCB
Hindustan TimesIn an affidavit filed in the Bombay High Court, the Narcotics Control Bureau has stated that its two Preliminary Enquiries against Indian Revenue Service officer Sameer Wankhede when he was Mumbai zonal director of the agency were necessary, as the allegations levelled against him were of serious and grave nature. The NCB, Mumbai, had allegedly asked an accused arrested in a separate contraband seizure case in 2021 and who was in the agency’s custody then, to pose as a customer and contact the Nigerian peddler on telephone in a bid to entrap the peddler. WhatsApp screenshots The NCB also submitted that unlike Wankhede’s claims, NCB’s Deputy Director General, Mumbai, Sanjay Kumar Singh, who is supervising the PE probes, was never Wankhede’s reporting authority during his stint in the agency and that the latter allegedly attempted to misguide and divert the court’s attention with WhatsApp screenshots in his petition. The NCB told the court that at the time the irregularities in the two cases allegedly took place, then DDG Ashok Mutha Jain was his reporting authority, not Singh who was then DDG and Delhi-based.