Mumbai: Aryan Khan, son of actor Shah Rukh Khan, had advised his friend Arbaaz Merchant not to carry drugs to the cruise party, the latter said in his statement to the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB).

Merchant (26) was named as an accused in the chargesheet submitted against 14 persons in the cruise drugs case on Friday. It is alleged that 6gm of charas was recovered from Merchant after the October 2021 raid. He is currently out on bail.

The chargesheet stated: “Merchant told [NCB] that he and Aryan are close friends and also admitted that Aryan was aware of the fact that he [Merchant] was an occasional hash (charas) consumer and that’s why told him not to carry any hash to the cruise as the NCB was very active these days.”

Aryan is among the six persons against whom all charges were dropped by the NCB’s special investigation team (SIT). His alleged statements are also part of the chargesheet.

In another statement recorded on October 7, 2021, while he was in NCB custody, Merchant was again quoted. “He [Merchant] said that Aryan told him that his parents have advised him not to indulge in any illegal activities, especially drug consumption,” the chargesheet said.

Merchant also allegedly told the NCB that he had travelled to the international cruise terminal in Aryan’s car with two others. The chargesheet said that Merchant had also named a man who organized parties for “rich kids of Bollywood kids” and that drugs are consumed at these parties.

Also quoted are statements of Merchant’s friends who were headed for the party too. They were questioned by the NCB, but let off. The friends, in their statements, allegedly said that when they were in the NCB office, Merchant came to them and apologized. “…that due to him they all got into a problem and he felt really sorry for all. . . ,” the chargesheet said.

Another friend said, “Arbaaz told us that he has told NCB officers that we are not connected with this drug recovery from him. ”

Merchant’s friend, who had travelled with Khan, another friend and him said that he and his friends were invited to the cruise party as VIP guests, but they could not board as some charas was allegedly recovered from Merchant.

Among other statements recorded is that of actor Ananya Panday recorded on October 22, 2021, in connection with certain chats from 2019, including an alleged chat with Aryan about procurement of weed.

While Panday acknowledged the chats, she told the NCB that the chats related to weed were said in jest. “She said that all the chats held with Aryan were an extension of the same joke as mentioned earlier,” the statement attributed to her said.

In 2020, the Supreme Court had held that statements made to NCB officers solely cannot be used as a confessional statement in the trial of an offence or to convict an accused under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS) Act.

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New Delhi: The NCB has categorized the cruise drugs case into seven parts based on the role of accused and their inter-linkeges allegedly involving different activities contravening the provisions of the NDPS Act. To establish ‘guilt’, NCB is learnt to have relied upon the oral testimony of witnesses, case property, documents including chats and monetary transaction reports, sources said.

“WhatsApp messages, voice notes, voluntary statements of accused recorded under Section 67 of the Act, chemical examination report and forensic extraction of the digital devices and recovery of drugs establish complicity of the accused except Aryan Khan, Avin Shau, Samir Sehgal, Gopal Ji Anand, Bhaskar Arora and Manav Singhal,” a source said.

A large part of the chargesheet, sources said, comprises statements of the accused and WhatsApp chats between them and attempts to interlink them. To establish links between two of the suspects, the NCB, for example, has cited a chat reading: “He asks 2500 but on bulk order it’s 1500”.

“This chat corroborates the fact that X has purchased pills from Y as disclosed by X & Z in their voluntary statement,” a source quoted from a probe report.

Ironically, in its internal report, the SIT had said that excessive reliance on WhatsApp chats would be “counterproductive” during the trial considering the fact that integrity of data extracted from Khan’s phone is questionable as there is no memo to show how and when his phone was seized. The NCB is likely to file a supplementary chargesheet.