A leading expert on U.S.-India relations who has advised successive U.S. administrations has been arrested and charged with unlawful retention of national defence information, including over a thousand pages of top secret and secret documents at his home, court documents showed.

Ashley Tellis, 64, who served on the National Security Council of former Republican President George W. Bush and is listed in an FBI court affidavit as an unpaid adviser to the State Department and a Pentagon contractor, was arrested at the weekend and charged on Monday, the documents seen on Tuesday showed.

Tellis is also a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.

A State Department official confirmed that Tellis was arrested on Saturday, but declined to comment

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