Sushant case: Rhea Chakraborty appears before NCB for questioning on 2nd day

Team Udayavani, Sep 7, 2020, 11:40 AM IST

Mumbai: Actress Rhea Chakraborty on Monday appeared before the NCB for questioning for the second straight day in the drugs case linked to the death of her live-in partner and actor Sushant Singh Rajput.

She was questioned for about six hours by the agency for the first time in this case on Sunday.

The 28-year-old arrived at the agency”s office in the Ballard Estate area around 9:30 am.

She was escorted by police personnel and was seen carrying a bag.

The agency has said that it wants to question Rhea and confront her with her younger brother Showik Chakraborty (24), Rajput”s house manager Samuel Miranda (33) and his house staffer Dipesh Sawant to ascertain their roles in this alleged drug racket after it obtained mobile phone chat records and other electronic data that suggested some banned drugs were allegedly procured by these people.

The NCB, over the last few days, has arrested these three men in this case.

Officials said the actor was questioned on these lines on Sunday.

She was earlier questioned by the ED and the CBI. Rhea, in interviews given to multiple TV news channels, has said that she has never consumed drugs herself. She had, however, claimed that the late actor used to consume marijuana.

The agency, meanwhile, also arrested a man Anuj Keshvani whose name came up during the interrogation of Kaizan Ebrahim who was arrested by it in this case earlier.

The agency had allegedly recovered and seized drugs like hashish, LSD and marijuana and cash after raids conducted against Keshvani on Sunday.

A total of nine people have been arrested till now by the NCB with seven directly linked to this probe while two were arrested by it when the investigation was launched under criminal sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.

When the probe in the case began, the agency had arrested two men, Abbas Lakhani and Karan Arora, for alleged drug peddling and officials have claimed that through them they reached Zaid Vilatra and Abdel Basit Parihar who are allegedly linked to this drugs case as they were in touch with Miranda.

It is claimed that Miranda told NCB investigators that he used to procure bud or curated marijuana for the late actor”s household.

Miranda, they had said, used to allegedly procure drugs from them on the purported instructions of Showik, agency officials said.

Both Lakhani and Arora have been granted bail. The NCB had said it recovered 59 grams of cannabis from them.

The NCB, while seeking remand of one of the accused in this case last week, had told a local court that it was looking into “the drug citadel in Mumbai, and especially Bollywood” in this probe.

This case has given the NCB an “inkling” into the narcotics network and its penetration in Bollywood or Hindi movie industry, NCB Deputy Director General Mutha Ashok Jain had told reporters last week.

Various angles surrounding the death of the 34-year-old actor are being probed by three federal agencies, including the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The NCB is probing a drug angle in this case after the ED shared with it a report following the cloning of two mobile phones of Rhea.

Rajput was found dead at his flat in the suburban Bandra area on June 14.