New Delhi:

Actor Rhea Chakraborty, arrested over drugs charges linked to the Sushant Singh Rajput case, was denied bail today by a Mumbai court. The bail requests of her brother Showik Chakraborty and eight other accused were also rejected.

Rhea Chakraborty will stay in Byculla jail, where she was taken after her first bail request was rejected by a magistrate who sent her to jail till September 22.

In her second request for bail, she had retracted her confession and said she was “coerced into making self-incriminatory confessions”. She said she had “not committed any crime whatsoever and had been falsely implicated in the case”. She had also claimed rape and death threats and “a severe toll on her mental health and well-being” because of multiple investigations.

But the Narcotics Control Bureau argued that if released on bail, the actor “may tamper with the evidence and also try to win over witnesses using her position in the society and money power”.

Rhea Chakraborty had conscious knowledge of drugs use by her boyfriend Sushant Singh Rajput, said the agency, and had “made herself part of this offence by procuring drugs” for him.

The anti-drugs bureau said Rhea Chakraborty used her credit card and payment gateways to facilitate financial transactions related to dealing of “illicit drug trafficking”.  It also insisted her confession was “voluntary”, not coerced, and admissible in the court of law.

The anti-drugs agency said the drugs financed (by Rhea Chakraborty) were not meant for personal consumption but for supplying them to another person. “Therefore, Section 27A of NDPS (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act) is applicable and she cannot escape the clutches of law,” it argued.

The 28-year-old actor was arrested on Monday on charges of buying drugs for Sushant Singh Rajput, a rising movie star whose death on June 14 is being investigated by various agencies including the CBI.