AFP

Campaigners for survivors of India's Bhopal disaster voiced distress Saturday that former Union Carbide boss Warren Anderson never faced trial over the deadly industrial accident following news the US citizen had died.
Thousands of people were killed when 40 tonnes of lethal methyl isocyanate gas spewed from the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, 740 kilometres (460 miles) from India's national capital just before midnight on December 2, 1984.
"He (Anderson) escaped liability," Rachna Dhingra, a member of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, a campaign outfit working with the disaster's survivors, told AFP.   
While Anderson's family did not announce his death, The New York Times reported Friday that the 92-year-old had died in a Florida nursing home on September 29, citing public records.
"It's good news -- (except) we would have loved it had he been hanged in an Indian prison," one Bhopal survivor, Shamshad Begum, said in an interview with the Indian Express as Indian newspapers devoted full pages to Anderson's death.
"He had no right to live as his company took thousands of lives," said Begum, who lost her four-year-old son a day after the gas leak occurred.
Anderson was chairman of the US-based Union Carbide parent group at the time of the accident.
He flew to Bhopal in central India a few days after the accident and was arrested but he was freed on bail and never returned to stand trial.
Union Carbide sold its stake in the Bhopal plant after the accident and the group was later acquired by chemicals giant Dow Chemical.
In 1989, Union Carbide paid $470 million in compensation to the Indian government. Dow insists all of Union Carbide's liabilities were settled in the 1989 agreement.
According to Indian official figures, 3,500 people died within days of the accident. But the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research later estimated the immediate number of deaths at 8,000 to 10,000.
The long-term impact of toxins released after the gas leak led to a string of diseases, which the council said killed 25,000 people by 1994.   
Survivors and their children say they have been afflicted by cancer, vision problems, tiredness, heart disease and other illnesses.
Indian authorities blamed the leak on design and maintenance problems but Union Carbide attributed the disaster to employee sabotage.