Mumbai: A day after Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) officer Sameer Wankhede was taken off the controversial cruise drugs case in which Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan was arrested, Wankhede’s father Dnyandev Wankhede has filed a defamation suit against Maharashtra minister and NCP leader Nawab Malik in the Bombay High Court and sought Rs. 1.25 crore in damages. Wankhede was removed from the case after he started facing several personal and service-related allegations, however, he will continue to be the Mumbai zone director of the agency.
Officials cited “administrative grounds” for the decision to transfer the six cases, which also include the one involving the son-in-law of Maharashtra cabinet minister Nawab Malik who had launched a tirade against Wankhede and levelled several allegations against him.
As per reports, Wankhede’s lawyer, Arshad Shaikh, said Malik has been calling the Wankhede family “fraud and questioning their religious beliefs, saying they are not Hindus”. He added that Malik was calling everybody (in the Wankhede family) a fraud almost on a daily basis. The lawsuit says that Malik has done “irreparable loss, damage, harm, prejudice to the name, character, reputation and societal image of plaintiff and his family members”.
Dhyandev filed the case wishing a permanent injunction to restrain Malik, his party members and all others from acting under or on his instructions from publishing, writing, or speaking in the media about the Wankhede family. Wankhede’s father has further appealed that the Bombay High Court should declare that Malik’s “remarks, insinuations and/or imputation, whether in writing or oral, stated by him” in press releases or interviews or social media, including but not limited to his Twitter account and his family members, be “tortious and defamatory in nature”. Dhyandev has also sought deletion of articles, tweets, interviews, including in electronic and social media.