रंगमंच

Who is KP Gosavi — ‘independent witness’ who planned to extort ₹25 crore from Aryan Khan?

The viral selfie shows KP Gosavi, who was a panch witness to the seizure of 6 grams of charas from Arbaaz Merchant on Cordelia, posing triumphantly with Aryan Khan. (HT Photo)

Wankhede has been booked by the CBI over an alleged ₹25-crore bribe demand from actor Shah Rukh Khan's family to spare his son Aryan Khan in a drugs case.

1. KP Gosavi, in conspiracy with his aide Sanvile D'Souza and others, had entered into the conspiracy to “extort an amount” of ₹25 crore from the family members of Aryan Khan, son of Shah Rukh Khan, by “threatening them of the accusation of offences of possession of Narcotics substances”, the CBI FIR alleged.

2. In order to let him walk free, Gosavi and D'Souza negotiated the amount bringing it down to ₹18 crore and even collected a token of ₹50 lakh and returned a part of the amount later, the FIR added.

3. Wankhede in the capacity of the immediate supervisory officer “had directed” to take Gosavi and Prabhakar Sail as the independent witness in the proceedings against the accused in the drug bust case, the FIR stated.

4. Wankhede had directed then NCB superintendent VV Singh to let Gosavi “handle the accused” while taking him to the NCB office thereby “allowing a freehand” to him and others in order to create a visual impression that Gosavi had the custody of the accused, it added.

5. The CBI alleged that violating all norms of an independent witness, Gosavi was allowed to be present in the company of the accused persons and even allowed to come to the NCB office after the raid and took the freedom to click selfies and recorded the voice note of an accused.

6. This position “allowed” Gosavi and D'Souza to enter into the “conspiracy” with others to allegedly demand a bribe from Shah Rukh Khan, news agency PTI quoted officials as saying.

7. NCP leader Nawab Malik was the first to question Gosavi’s presence inside the NCB office. Malik who claimed his son-in-law too had been framed by the NCB, realised that it was most unusual for an officer from an investigating agency to take such photos and make them public, began his own investigation into the man in the selfie with Aryan Khan.

8. In his first press briefing on October 6, 2021, the NCP leader revealed that Gosavi was not with the NCB, and was in fact an independent witness called by Wankhede.

9. Gosavi, allegedly on the run, was arrested on October 28, 2021, in a cheating case from 2018 when he had allegedly duped one Chinmay Deshmukh of ₹18 lakh under the pretext of giving him a job in Malaysia.

10. Days after Gosavi came to limelight as his selfie with Aryan, Prabhakar Sail alleged that he had taken ₹50 lakh from an individual after the raid at the Goa-bound Cordellia ship.