CBI arrests NCB officer, Kolkata's renowned lawyer for allegedly demanding extortion money

According to reports, officers from CBI's Anti-Corruption Branch caught lawyer Danish Haque red handed from his office at Park Circus area when he was taking the extortion money.

Later, an intelligence officer of NCB, Amarendra Kumar Singh, was nabbed from the drug control agency's Eastern Region headquarter at Rajarhat New Town area.

"Recently, a Kolkata based businessman, Pratap Aditya, lodged a complaint with the CBI's Anti Corruption Branch alleging that a NCB officer and an advocate of the Calcutta High Court had demanded two lakh rupees from him as extortion," a source in the CBI told IBNS.

"The businessman also claimed that the duo was threatening him to slap narcotic charges on him if he did not pay the money. The city businessman also submitted few phone call recordings as a proof of his complaint," the CBI source said.

"After starting investigation into it under Prevention of Corruption Act, we arrested the lawyer red handed from his Park Circus office while he was taking 50 thousand rupees from the complainant businessman as an installment of the extortion and later nabbed the NCB officer from the agency's New Town office," he added.

Meanwhile, a senior official of NCB's Eastern Region said that a departmental probe has been initiated against Amarendra Kumar Singh.

"The complainant businessman, Pratap Aditya, is also an accused in a party drug case and we are inquiring to know why our officer contacted an accused and demanded extortion from him," an NCB officer told IBNS.   

Lawyer Danish Haque represented TMC legislator and Kolkata's deputy mayor, Iqbal Ahmed, in Narada sting case and he also argued for actor Vikram Chatterjee in model Sonika Singh Chauhan death case.

The arrested duo will be produced before a CBI special court in the city on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Deepayan Sinha)