There was no redemption for Warren M. Anderson — accused no. 1 in the criminal case pertaining to the Bhopal gas tragedy — in life. On Thursday, it seemed there was none in death. Hearing of his death, a full one month after he passed away at a nursing home in Vero Beach, Florida, on September 29, survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy assembled outside the now-defunct Union Carbide factory and placed a large portrait of him. Then, one by one, they spat at the photograph. With his death, the struggle to get the former CEO of Union Carbide extradited has hit a dead end.
The tragedy was one of the worst industrial disasters in the world, leaving thousands of people dead and over half a million injured on the intervening night of December 2 and 3, 1984. Anderson was the chief executive officer of the UCC, owner of Union Carbide India Ltd., which ran the plant from where the deadly methyl isocyanate leaked into the densely populated bastis of Old Bhopal.