A well-known US scholar on India who advised the US government was charged with retaining classified information and allegedly met Chinese officials, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Ashley Tellis, 64, who has worked in or advised the US government for more than two decades, was found to have kept more than 1,000 pages of top-secret or secret documents in his home, a criminal affidavit said.

Late in the evening of September 25, Tellis entered the State Department, where he served as an unpaid advisor, and appeared to print from a secret document on US Air Force techniques, the affidavit said.

It said Tellis met multiple times with Chinese government officials at a restaurant in the Washington suburb of Fairfax, Virginia.

At one dinner, Tellis entered with a manila envelope but did not appear

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