Residents of the central Indian city of Bhopal have marked the 25th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster with public protests, demanding that the culprits be brought to justice.
No one has ever been prosecuted for the explosion at a pesticide plant in the city just after midnight on December 3, 1984. The plant, owned by the U.S. firm Union Carbide, released a cloud of poisonous methyl isocyanate into the air, which killed over 10,000 people within three days, and left many thousands more with permanent health problems.
Large amounts of toxic waste remains at the site, polluting groundwater, and residents continue to suffer chronic health problems and birth defects. According to some estimates the deadly gas leak, which affected up to half a million people, has claimed the lives of 25,000 people since 1984.
In the early hours of Thursday a large crowd of locals gathered at the site of the plant, and held a candle-lit vigil for the victims.
Later in the day, activists and survivors held a rally, chanting slogans against Union Carbide and the government for their failure to clean up the area, where local drinking water still contains 1,000 times the permitted level of carbon tetrachloride, a cancer-causing pollutant.
The government of the Madhya Pradesh province took responsibility for the site in 1998.
The Dow Chemical Company, which now owns Union Carbide, says that cleaning up the waste is the sole responsibility of the Indian government, and that the $470-million compensation settlement reached in 1989 absolves the company of any further claims.
The Indian government only recently agreed to fund new research into the long-term health effects of the 1984 gas leak.
MOSCOW, December 3 (RIA Novosti)
