The US multinational Dow Chemical Corporation is now denying a report that it has accepted full responsibility for the world's worst industrial accident.

The firm has also denied that it has put together a $12 billion compensation package for victims of the disaster, which occurred in India on 3 December 1984.

The report, coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, appeared on the BBC in an interview with a spokesman purporting to speak for Dow.

The BBC now says the report is inaccurate and was part of what it calls an elaborate deception.

Denying the report earlier, a spokesman for Union Carbide said by telephone from London, 'The BBC story is false.'

Many thousands of people were killed in the Indian city of Bhopal when toxic gas leaked from a plant belonging to Union Carbide, which has since become a subsidiary of Dow Chemical.