The Bombay High Court on Saturday issued a decision granting superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan bail in the drugs-on-cruise case and it said that there was ‘no positive evidence of conspiracy’ between him and the other two defendants.
Following a Narcotics Control Bureau raid on a cruise ship in Mumbai on October 2, Aryan Khan was detained along with co-accused Munmun Dhamecha and Arbaz Merchant. On October 29, the Bombay High Court had granted them bail.
The bail order stated that ‘nothing objectionable was found in Khan’s WhatsApp chats’ to show that Aryan Merchant and Dhamecha were involved in a conspiracy. The court added that the fact that Khan, Merchant, and Dhamecha were on the same cruise which cannot be used as the basis for a conspiracy indictment against them.
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The HC further said that the NCB cannot rely on the confessional statements of the accused. ‘Such confessional statements are not having any binding effect in law’ as per a 2013 Supreme Court judgment’, it said.
‘The accused were not even subjected to medical examination so as to determine whether, at the relevant time, they had consumed drugs’, the court further observed.
The bail ruling said that it is impossible to conclude that Khan, Merchant, and Dhamecha are participating in a commercial quantity offence at this time and there is a lack of substantial record to infer they have devised a criminal conspiracy.
Aryan Khan and the other defendants were freed on a personal bond of Rs 1 lakh each by the court. The three has been ordered to give their passports to the special NDPS court and not to leave the country without first seeking permission from the court.
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