New Delhi - India dropped bribery charges against Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, one of the highest-profile criminal cases in the country that lasted over two decades, news reports said Wednesday.

The government told the Supreme Court Tuesday that it had decided to withdraw the case against Quattrocchi, who as accused of being an conduit in the Bofors gun scam, the Economic Times newspaper reported.

In April, Indian authorities withdrew his name from the Interpol wanted list.

The central government consented to withdraw from Quattrocchi's prosecution, Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium told a Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan.

He said India's premier investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, decided to close the case, taking into account the Delhi High Court judgment in 2004 that no corruption was proven in the Bofors deal.

Quattrocchi, who allegedly received 7 million dollars in bribes, has been the lone remaining suspect in the arms scandal dating back to the mid-1980s. Sweden's AB Bofors company was alleged to have paid kickbacks in a 1.3-billion-dollar sale of 155-millimetre field howitzers.

Besides Quattrocchi, then-prime minister Rajiv Gandhi of the Congress party and the London-based billionaire Hinduja brothers were accused in the case.

Gandhi and his Italian-born widow Sonia Gandhi, now chief of the Congress Party which leads the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA), were allegedly close to Quattrocchi.

The scandal led to the election defeat of Gandhi in 1989, two years before he was assassinated.

In 2004, the Delhi High Court quashed all charges against Gandhi, the Swedish firm and the Hinduja brothers, including Srichand, Gopichand and Prakash Hinduja.

The government's decision came under immediate attack by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad was quoted by the Indian Express daily as saying the UPA's "covert designs to bury one of the biggest scandals of independent India" was driven by the fact that Quattrocchi had information which could have made "higher-ups in the present political dispensation uncomfortable."

"This is the biggest blot on the UPA government," Prasad said. "Its integrity would always be suspect after today's action."(dpa)