MUMBAI: The city police got a jolt on Friday when a sessions court acquitted Provogue owner Salil Chaturvedi of the 2005 drugs case. The court
refused to buy the prosecution’s allegation that he possessed three grams of cocaine, which cops claimed was found from the bathroom of his Lokhandwala bungalow in August 2005.

Police officials, led by the then additional commissioner of police Parambir Singh, had repeatedly stated that Chaturvedi bought drugs from three arrested Tanzanians regularly and supplied them to others. Officials also claimed to have collected evidence that showed there were transcripts of incriminating conversation between his staffers. Chaturvedi also owns two pubs in the city.

The chargesheet filed by cops in 2006, however, said Chaturvedi was arrested only for possession of three grams of cocaine. The others chargesheeted in the case included former Provogue staffers Vishal Maghnani, Allwyn Sequeira and Joe Sequeira, policemen Sanjay Shinde and Shantilal Jadhav and Tanzanian nationals Thomas Odombo, Sako Syed and David.

No senior officer was available to comment on the acquittal. Singh messaged TOI, saying he was in Haryana because of a death in the family.

Chaturvedi, who was behind bars for nearly 36 days, said, “I was framed from the very beginning. The court’s order has restored my faith in the judiciary, but what about the trauma that me and my family have gone through? I demand an inquiry into the frame-up.”

Chaturvedi’s advocate, Rizwan Merchant, said, “Based on our complaint, the court had directed the Narcotics Control Bureau to probe into the allegations. But no inquiry has been carried out till date.”

The case dates back to January 26, 2005, when police detained Sequeira who was allegedly carrying vials of cocaine in a parcel to be delivered in Chennai. Sequeira was arrested on March 3, 2005, and the Chennai address belonged to Maghnani, who was arrested on June 23, 2005. Assistant police inspectors Shinde and Jadhav were arrested in July 2005 for allegedly trying to replace cocaine with boric acid powder and extort money from Maghnani.

On August 3, 2005, police carried a search of Chaturvedi’s house but could not find anything. At the last minute, however, constable Ashok Bhosle–who had gone to the loo–came out declaring that he had found three grams of drugs in the bathroom.

“If I was into drugs and under the scanner, would I be foolish enough to keep drugs in the bathroom,” Chaturvedi asked on Friday. However, Bhosle’s statement was never recorded.

Merchant argued in court that there were many people at the house when it was raided and there was no way of showing that the cocaine was in Chaturvedi’s possession. He also pointed to contradictions in witnesses’ statements which led to the acquittal.

A major reprieve for Chaturvedi came in February 2008 when the Bombay high court said he should be tried separately from other accused in the case. Chaturvedi’s lawyers had argued that all the accused were not arrested at the same time and also the amounts of drugs seized from them were different, so they could not have been involved in the same case; a single trial would have meant Chaturvedi being tried as part of a larger conspiracy where the contraband seized was 867 gram.