Delhi court allows India's Pachauri to visit US

An Indian court yesterday allowed former UN climate panel head Rajendra Pachauri, who is currently facing sexual harassment charges, to travel abroad to attend the last rites of a relative, a lawyer said.

Pachauri, 74, was barred from travelling abroad by a New Delhi court in April pending a police investigation after a female researcher at his research institute accused him of sexual harassment in February.

"The court allowed him to attend his brother-in-law's last rites in the Hawaii from June 29 to July 9 on a surety bond of 100,000 rupees," lawyer Prashant Mendiratta, who represents the complainant, told AFP.

The court asked him to report to the nearest Indian consulate in US, he said, adding they will not challenge the court order citing humanitarian grounds.

Pachauri's lawyer was not immediately available for comment.

Earlier this week, officers from Delhi police questioned Pachauri for first time at his New Delhi residence.

Police grilled him for hours based on the evidence provided by the 29-year-old woman, who accused him of sexually harassing her through repeated inappropriate emails, text and WhatsApp messages.

Pachauri, a leading voice on the dangers of global warming, has denied the allegations and said his emails and mobile phone were hacked.

A court granted him anticipatory bail and asked the police to complete the investigations before a hearing next month.

The woman's harassment complaint forced him to step down as the chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and take a long leave from the New Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), where both of them worked.