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Seven men jailed over 1984
Bhopal gas tragedy that killed
15,000 people
By Mail Foreign Service
11:00 07 Jun 2010, updated 08:01 08 Jun 2010
Seven men have been jailed over the 1984
Bhopal poison gas leak which killed at least
15,000 people.
The convictions are the first since the Indian
disaster, when a pesticide plant run by Union
Carbide leaked tons of gas.
About 4,000 died straight away and the rest
succumbed over the following years.
Union Carbide, an American chemical company,
said the leak was the result of sabotage by a
disgruntled employee who was never identified.
It denied that it was caused by lax safety
standards or faulty plant design.
India's Central Bureau of Investigation originally
accused 12 defendants: eight senior Indian
company officials; Warren Anderson, the head
of Union Carbide at the time of the gas leak;
the company itself and two subsidiary
companies.
Seven of the eight Indian company officials
have now been sentenced to two years in jail by
a court in Bhopal. The eighth has since died.
Anderson was briefly detained immediately after
the disaster, but he quickly left the country and
now lives in New York.
Last July, the court issued a warrant for
Anderson's arrest and ordered the Indian
government to press Washington for the
American's extradition.
It is not clear whether the Indian government is
processing the Bhopal court's request.
Extradition proceedings are usually mired in a
complex tangle of legal paperwork and can take
years to complete.
The plant was closed after the disaster, and
Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical Co
in 2001.
The sentences, which were handed down in a
local court and are likely to be appealed, came
as the case crawled through India's notoriously
slow and ineffective judicial system.
Survivors, relatives and rights activists gathered
in the city for the verdict today but said the
sentences were 'too little, too late.'
On December 3, 1984, a pesticide plant run by
the subsidiary of Union Carbide leaked about 40
tons of deadly methyl isocyanate gas into the
air in Bhopal, central India, quickly killing about
4,000 people.
The lingering effects of the poison raised the
death toll to about 15,000 over the next few
years.
Activists insist the real numbers are almost
twice that, and say the company and
government have failed to clean up toxic
chemicals at the plant, which closed after the
accident.
Investigators say the accident occurred when
water entered a sealed tank containing the
highly reactive gas, causing pressure in the tank
to rise too high.
The Central Bureau of Investigation said the
plant had not been following proper safety
procedures.
Dow says the legal case was resolved in 1989
when Union Carbide settled with the Indian
government for $470million, and that all
responsibility for the factory now rests with the
government of the state of Madhya Pradesh,
which now owns the site.