Act against cops who framed me, says senior officer

Mumbai: Suhas Gokhale, the senior police inspector who was arrested in an Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances case involving lady drug mafia Shashikala alias Baby Patankar, on Wednesday filed an application before the special Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) court seeking action against the police for falsely implicating him in the case. The application has been filed as the second FSL report from Hyderabad Forensic Lab has also confirmed that the substance seized in this case is not drugs. He has claimed, despite the FSL report the police is neither filing closure report nor the charge-sheet while also keeping prosecution alive against him.

Mr Gokhale’s lawyer Ayaz Khan said, “It is very unfair that the CA (chemical analyser) report is negative and yet the prosecution is delaying the filing of the charge-sheet or filing an application by themselves under section 169 of CrPC for discharging the accused, more specifically because police officers are wrongly prosecuted in this case. Mr Gokhale has requested the special NDPS court to direct initiation of prosecution of all concerned officers under section 58 (i) (c) and 58 (2) of the NDPS Act under which the investigating officer could be sent to jail for six months and can also be fined for vexatious and unnecessary arresting any person.

He has also sought court's direction for commissioner of police for a probe in the case.

In his application filed through advocate Khan, Mr Gokhale stated that despite receiving chemical analyser's report on May 29, 2015 in which it was stated that the seized substance was a not narcotic drug the prosecution chose to arrest him.

According to him the prosecution was purposely avoiding filing charge sheet on the pretext that samples of seized substance are to be retested.

According to him, the report of retesting was filed before the court on March 2, 2019 and the court had directed the investigating officer (IO) to file a report under section 173 (2) (report of police officer on completion of investigation) within a month but this order was not followed. Since then court granted time to IO on various occasions to file the report and last day to file this report was on May 22, but on Wednesday too report was not filed.