Bharatiya Janata Party has expressed surprise at the reported arrest of Ottavio Quattrocchi in a far off place like Argentina as also the timing of the arrest.

Speaking to rediff.com, Ravi Shankar Prasad, the party's spokesman, said that the party would raise the matter both inside and outside Parliament.

"We are certainly going to raise the issue in a big manner. We will demand that Quattrocchi should be allowed to say whatever he wants to in the Bofors case and put forward his point of view. He slipped out of India when the Narasimha Rao government was in power," he said.

Prasad expressed his apprehension on whether Quattrocchi would be brought to India at all.

"An officer of the present government went to London and helped Quattrocchi in taking out money from a bank account that had been frozen at the behest of the CBI. The Supreme Court has now directed the agency to recover the amount from Quattrocchi," the BJP spokesman said.

Congressmen were tight lipped about the news of the arrest. A senior leader of the party said that the arrest of Quattrocchi could not have taken place without the express approval of Sonia Gandhi who may have decided to dump him as he was becoming a liability for her and her party.