NEW DELHI: Union external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday pulled out some skeletons from the Gandhi family closet in a fierce response to the allegations leveled by the opposition against her in the Lalitgate issue.

She referred to the murky details of the Bhopal gas tragedy mentioned in the autobiography of the Congress leader Arjun Singh. Swaraj alleged that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi allowed safe passage to Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson in a "quid pro quo" to secure the release of his childhood friend Adil Shahryar who was serving 35 years sentence in a US jail.

The Bhopal disaster was a gas leak incident at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in December 1984 in which over 3000 people were killed and 500,000 people affected. Warren Anderson, an American businessman, served as chairman of the UCIL at the time.

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Shahryar, on the other hand, was arrested in August 1981 and tried on charges of attempting to firebomb a ship, false statements on various certificates in connection with the shipment, mail fraud, making of a firearm and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. He was granted clemency by President Ronald Reagan in 1985 on the day Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited the US even as he was not eligible for parole until 1991.

Adil Shahryar was the son of Mohammad Yunus, an Indian civil servant in the foreign service. Yunus served as ambassador to Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq and Spain. Yunus was an associate of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi and therefore a very close family friend.

During the trial, it was proven that Adil Shahryar's company, the Caribbean International Investment Corporation, committed fraud and supplied scrap paper instead of 25,000 video cassettes it was supposed to send under a contract to an England based company. The trial established that Shahryar had intended to set the shipment on fire in order to claim $243,750 from the American Express bank.

In 1985, according to the newspaper India Abroad, Rajiv Gandhi denied that he had asked the US President to grant clemency to his friend, but he was quick to add, "We do believe that he has been wrongly imprisoned."

Shahryar died in 1990 and his father Yunus died in 2001.