NEW DELHI, 9 June 2006 — Rahul Mahajan’s claims of innocence yesterday on charges of drug abuse carried little weight and was packed off to Tihar Jail till June 22. Rahul’s two-day stay in police custody ended yesterday, Delhi police had sought an extension, which was rejected by the Patiala House Court. Instead, Rahul was handed a 14-day judicial remand and has been placed in Tihar Jail.
Rahul, earlier in the day, denied any links to drugs. “I am innocent, I am very ill,” Rahul said outside Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia hospital, where he was taken for a check-up.
Medical reports have, however, confirmed that his urine samples had traces of heroin. Besides, drug abuse had brought Rahul to Apollo for a day in 2002 too. Though the authorities then claimed that he was suffering from meningitis, the facts were exposed when his father, the late Pramod Mahajan, packed him off to a rehabilitation center in London. When Rahul collapsed at a London nightclub in 2003, due to alleged drug abuse, he was called back and admitted to a hospital in Bombay.
Apart from Rahul, six other persons have been arrested in the case. Drug abuse at his late father’s Safdarjung residence on Thursday night proved fatal for Vivek Moitra (Pramod’s secretary), who was declared dead at Apollo. The other six arrested are Sahil Zaroo, a Kashmiri student who may have supplied drugs to Rahul and Moitra, three Nigerians suspected to be drug peddlers, Harish Sharma (an aide of Pramod) and Ganesh, a family domestic servant. Sharma and Ganesh are accused of destroying evidence by cleaning the Safdarjung residence, soon after the two were rushed to hospital.
Nine persons are allegedly illegally detained by Delhi police in connection with the Rahul case. Relatives of these persons filed a complaint earlier this week before the National Human Rights Commission saying that Anil Singh and eight others working as household staff at the Safdarjung residence were illegally detained by Delhi police.
The nine, according to the complaint, were forcibly picked on the morning of June 2. During their detention, they were mercilessly beaten up by the police and were neither produced before any court nor released. They were not even permitted to contact their relatives. NHRC sought a report from Delhi police yesterday in connection with illegal detention of the nine persons.
Denying that they were acting on Vajpayee’s instructions, senior BJP leaders Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Kalraj Mishra visited Rahul yesterday at Tughlaq Road police station. They were with Rahul for five minutes, who reportedly was very happy to see them and smiled for the first time since the crisis began. On his visit, Naqvi said: “We have come to inquire about his well being and wish him good luck in overcoming this crisis.” The party or Vajpayee had nothing to do with their visit as sources close to Naqvi and Mishra said: “It was a purely a voluntary act and they had gone there to extend moral support to Rahul in their personal capacity.”
