MUMBAI: A special NDPS court on Thursday rejected the bail application filed by Anuj Keshwani, one of the co-accused along with Rhea Chakrabarty, girlfriend of late Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput. He was allegedly found in possession of a commercial quantity of LSD, a prohibited drug under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.
The Bombay high court had last November directed the Gujarat Forensic Science Laboratory to submit its report within six weeks to the special NDPS court after holding that merely because a blotter paper can be licked or put in a glass of water, does not necessarily mean that the paper must be excluded whilst determining the LSD weight.
The Gujarat FSL must give “weight of each of the blot papers purportedly containing LSD on it," said the HC.
The FSL in its report to the NDPS court on December 31, 2021, said it was “not possible to reanalyse" it further to check for presence of LSD from individual blot paper, as extraction process was carried out from all the blot papers.
Keshwani has been in Taloja central prison since his arrest in 2020. While the HC had granted bail to Rhea in October 2020, the special NDPS trial court granted her brother and co-accused Showik bail in December 2020 saying he was not concerned with the seizure of “commercial quantity" of LSD from the co-accused Keshwani.
LSD, a hallucinogenic narcotic drug, is placed as small dots on the blotter paper, for consumption.
Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) had claimed that Keshwani, a 31-year-old Mumbai resident, was found in possession of 0.62 gm, a commercial quantity, last September.
NCB had petitioned the HC against an order of the special judge for re-testing of the sample seized. To ascertain whether each of the blotter paper contains LSD. The agency had said and the HC accepted that the paper weight must be factored in to decide the quantity of LSD seized.
Reasoned order of bail rejection would be made available later.
