A day after India's narcotics control authority charged Bollywood actress Rhea Chakraborty and 32 others in a drugs case linked to the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, her lawyer Saturday described the chargesheet as a "damp squib".
The 12,000-page chargesheet, filed in a special court by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), contains the testimonies of over 200 people, and physical and digital evidence.
However, Rhea's lawyer Satish Manshinde said that the chargesheet in the drugs case "is a damp squib standing on the foundation of inadmissible evidence and statements", and that it would not stand in any court of law.
"The entire NCB, from top to bottom, was engaged in unearthing the drug angle in Bollywood. There is hardly any material against any known faces who were paraded during the investigations," he told the local media.
NCB started probing the drugs scandal following the death of Sushant in June last year. Among the first to be arrested in the case were Rhea and her brother Showik. Both are currently out on bail.
Rhea was, in fact, arrested by NCB on September 9, following days of questioning, and accused of procuring cannabis for her late actor-boyfriend, whose body was found hanging from a ceiling fan in his Mumbai flat on June 14.
Immediately after the arrest of Rhea, the names of at least 20 top Bollywood celebrities - from actors to filmmakers to designers - surfaced in the drugs case.
Several of them, including leading female Bollywood actors - Rakul Preet Singh, Deepika Padukone, Sara Ali Khan and Shraddha Kapoor - were subsequently grilled by NCB. All the actors, however, reportedly denied any links with such drug dealers.
The grilling took place in the wake of WhatsApp chats retrieved from Rhea's mobile phone indicating that they procured banned substances like cannabis, weed and hash from dealers with links to foreign countries.
