A leading expert on US-India relations who has advised successive US 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 on 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 furth

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