CBI seeks extradition of Warren Anderson (Lead)

March 22nd, 2011 - 8:33 pm ICT by IANS  

New Delhi/Bhopal, March 22 (IANS) The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Tuesday moved a petition in court seeking extradition of former Union Carbide Corporation chairman Warren Anderson in the Bhopal gas tragedy case.

In its application filed before Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Vinod Yadav in New Delhi, the CBI demanded that extradition proceedings against Anderson should begin.

After considering the urgent application, Magistrate Yadav kept the application for further hearing Wednesday.

Warren Anderson is the main accused in the 1984 Bhopal Gas tragedy when a toxic gas leak from the Union Carbide Corporation’s now defunct pesticide plant in the Madhya Pradesh capital Bhopal killed and maimed thousands of people on the intervening night of Dec 2-3.

The CBI move, however, did not create any excitement among Bhopal’s activists.

“Ye CBI Ka Naya Shagufa Hai (This is CBI’s new propaganda)”, leading activist and gas leak survivor Abdul Jabbar told IANS in Bhopal.

“There is a meeting of the group of ministers Friday and the Supreme Court would hear the case on increasing compensation to survivors from April 13, so the CBI has put this petition before the court only to show it’s doing something,” Jabbar said.

“The CBI had talked about this more than a hundred times during the court trial but they did not pursue Anderson’s extradition. We still doubt their intention”, he added.

Satinath Sarangi, another activist leader, said: “The Bhopal court had issued warrant against Anderson in 1992 and the CBI demanded his extradition in 2003. Within six months it was rejected by the US government saying the application had several flaws.

“Now it is filed again almost an year of the gas tragedy verdict. Let’s see how is the CBI going to press the US government.”

In June 2010 a Bhopal court sentenced former Union Carbide India chairman Keshub Mahindra and six others to two years’ imprisonment each in the gas tragedy case, nearly 26 years after the world’s worst industrial disaster left thousands dead.

The verdict came under attack from civil rights activists and political parties.

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