Hearing a plea here on Tuesday, a special court permitted Shreyas Kenjale, son of retired ACP, accused in a drugs case, to produce before it, CCTV footage of his building. The footage, he claimed, shows that his allegations of false implication by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) are true.
The NCB had alleged that it had recovered 300 g of Marijuana and 6.8 g of LSD blots from Kenjale’s Goregaon flat.
In Nov last year, the accused’s father, Anant Kenjale, a retired ACP, had filed an affidavit before the court stating that his son had been falsely implicated. The son in a retraction statement made after his custodial interrogation by the NCB had also claimed that the NCB’s then zonal director Sameer Wankhede had visited his flat during the procedure but has not been named in the document. Wankhede was also not searched, he had contended.
Shreyas had further alleged that the NCB’s independent witnesses or its officers mentioned in the panchnama were not present during the search.
He had also stated that other family members who were present in the flat during the procedure were not mentioned and nor was his father, who had come in during the procedure after a phone call the family made to him.
The NCB had opposed this plea and told the court that the CCTV footage cannot be considered at this stage as it is not the stage when evidence can be produced by the defence.
Special judge under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act VG Raghuvanshi stated in the order that the court agrees with the agency’s submission, but said that procedural law does not prevent an accused from filing documents on record before the arrival of the stage of recording of the accused’s statement.
It said that they shall be taken into account only at the stage of recording the accused’s statement.
