Sameer Wankhede, Zonal Director of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), has gained a lot of attention for the operation in which the NCB raided a rave party organized at a cruise ship in Mumbai and detained Shahrukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan. NCB arrested Aryan Khan later and reportedly recovered drugs from his lens case.
Officer Wankhede is not a novice when it comes to high profile investigations. He has also investigated the Sushant Singh Rajput case after the drug angle was revealed and probed Rhea Chakraborty and others involved in the case.
Sameer Wankhede, a 2008 batch IRS-C&CE officer, was previously posted as Joint Director of Revenue Intelligence in Mumbai. He also held the post of Additional SP in NIA and Deputy Commissioner in AIU. Wankhede’s first posting was as a Customs Officer at Mumbai Airport. He was also honored by the Union Home Ministry with the award of Outstanding Investigation for the year 2021.
Sameer Wankhede’s team has seized drugs worth Rs 17,000 crore in the last two years of investigation. According to reports, Wankhede also filed cases against more than 2000 celebrities for not paying tax in customs. Sameer Wankhede also caught Mika Singh with foreign currency at Mumbai airport in 2013 and raided the houses of many Bollywood celebs including Anurag Kashyap, Vivek Oberoi, Ram Gopal Varma.
Meanwhile, the NCB officer Sameer Wankhede is married to the Marathi actress Kranti Redkar who also starred in the 2003 bollywood film ‘Gangajal’ along with Ajay Devgan. On being asked about her husband’s recent raids, Kranti Redkar said, “Sameer has always been a hard worker. His operations and cases were there even before too. Today, he is dealing with Bollywood-related drug probe cases, which is why it is getting highlighted. I give him his space when he is investigating or working on operations. I never ask him what happened, how it happened because I respect the secrecy of his job. I take care of everything at home, which is why he can concentrate on his cases more.”
After the raid on the cruise Ship rave party, NCB seized a huge amount of narcotics and detained 10 people. The ship was supposedly going from Mumbai to Goa. According to reports, every person present in that party had paid a entry fee of more than 80 thousand rupees. As per sources, Mumbai Zonal Director Sameer Wankhede and other NCB officials acted on an intelligence input and boarded the ship as normal passengers and carried out the operation.
Following the raid, there have been allegations that Wankhede is selectively targeting Aryan Khan. However, he said in a statement, “We are not targeting anyone at all. We have nothing against him. We have arrested more than 300 people in the last 10 months. Out of those, at the most, there would be about 4 to 5 known people. How can you say that we are targeting anyone? Most of those arrested in the last one year are hard-core, drug related criminals.”
