Will drag Preeti Menon to court: Maharastra minister Eknath Khadse on 'links' with Dawood

Bengaluru: Following the furore after Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Preeti Sharma Menon raised the issue of Maharashtra BJP minister Eknath Khadse being on the most dialled list of Mumbai underworld fugitive Dawood Ibrahim's international call list, the latter on Sunday asserted that he is all set to launch legal proceedings against her as her charges were false and baseless, as usual.

"Preeti Sharma Menon has already made several allegations against me and the Maharashtra government and since all of them were baseless, she already has almost five to six cases of defamation against her," Khadse told reporters here.

Asserting that AAP devotedly followed the trend of making bogus allegations, Khadse said that Mumbai Crime Branch Joint Commissioner Atulchandra Kulkarni had personally given the clean to him, in which all his call records for the past one year showed that no international call has been made nor has been received, adding that if this did not satisfy Menon, then he did not know what would.

"If they can't believe these proofs then they can go to court. Anyway I don't think they have any set agenda here as this is all just a publicity stunt. No one knows her name as she is practically a nobody and she is trying to get some speck of attention using my name. I will drag her to court if I have to," Khadse said.

Attacking the AAP leader earlier for levelling "baseless allegations" against him, Khadse said, "Rather, I want to say people who are levelling allegations against me, how do know about Dawood's number. If they know Dawood's number, they should go to police and lodge a complaint. Levelling charges against me in the media for cheap publicity is not a good thing."

"The entire world is after Dawood, and they got his number, it means that there is something. How do they know that it's Dawood's number and I have spoken to Dawood only? If they have Dawood's number, and when America and entire world is unable to find him, they should have gone to police and inform them. It's their responsibility as citizen of India," Khadse told ANI.

Giving a clean chit to Khadse, Mumbai Crime Branch Joint Commissioner Atulchandra Kulkarni had said that when the issue of contact of Khadse with Dawood Ibrahim based abroad cropped up, they checked the details and their initial analysis of the cell phone records of the number (9423073667) indicated that there have been neither outgoing nor incoming from the cell number to that of the fugitive during the entire period of September 2015 to April 2016.

Earlier, citing a sensational scoop by an 'ethical hacker' Manish Bhangale, the AAP had demanded Khadse's resignation.

"Eknath Khadse lied about his phone being out of service. His number received several calls from Dawood Ibrahim's wife Mehjabeen Shaikh's number between September 4 2015 to April 5, 2016," AAP spokesperson Preeti Sharma Menon claimed in a press conference in Mumbai.