MUMBAI, July 16: Bollywood actor Salman Khan on Saturday denied allegations he was linked to organized crime and said he was a victim of underworld harassment and needed protection from gangsters.

In audio tapes printed in the Hindustan Times newspaper and broadcast by several television networks on Thursday, a man alleged to be Salman Khan is heard threatening former Miss World and Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai with underworld retribution if she did not take part in stage shows sponsored by mafia don Abu Salem.

In an interview with the the Times of India newspaper published on Saturday, Salman Khan said the tapes, allegedly recorded in 2001, were fake and claimed that gangsters who use black money to back Bollywood films had threatened him in the recent past.

“I was threatened by the underworld and therefore I was given police protection until 2002. The police too know it and therefore there is no question of me being involved with them,” Salman Khan told the English-language daily.

“My initial response on reading media reports was of shock. The media is desperately looking for sensational stories to sell itself in a competitive market and I was the convenient fall guy.”

His lawyer, Dipesh Mehta, has threatened to sue the Hindustan Times for publishing transcripts from the tapes and attributing the comments to Khan.

Hindu right-wing protesters disrupted the screening of Khan’s latest film, ‘Maine Pyar Kyon Kiya’, on Friday and demanded his arrest for a comment in the tapes that he knew about a series of bomb blasts suspected to have been organized by the mafia in Mumbai in 1993. —AFP