Weapons of mass destruction were destroyed long ago, Blix suggests

THE former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix believes that Iraq destroyed most of its weapons of mass destruction ten years ago, but kept up the appearance that it had them to deter a military attack.

In an Australian radio interview broadcast yesterday, Mr Blix said it was unlikely the US and British teams searching for weapons would find more than some "documents of interest".

"I’m certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed all, almost, of what they had in the summer of 1991," Mr Blix told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.

"The more time that has passed, the more I think it’s unlikely that anything will be found."

His comments were backed up by Demetrius Perricos, the new acting head of the UN weapons inspection body. Saying he expects to return to Iraq one day, Mr Perricos said: "I still don’t believe the weapons would be there. We inspected almost 500 sites."

Mr Blix indicated he thought the US-led coalition had backtracked on the issue of Iraq’s weapons as weeks passed without the discovery of a "smoking gun".

"In the beginning they talked about weapons concretely, and later on they talked about weapons programmes. Maybe they’ll find some documents of interest," he said.

Mr Blix, who spent three years searching for Iraqi chemical, biological and ballistic weapons as head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), said Iraq might have tried to fool the US into believing it had such weapons in order to deter attack.

"I mean, you can put up a sign on your door, ‘Beware of the Dog’, without having a dog," he said from his home in Sweden.

The US, Britain and Australia invaded Iraq in May after saying Saddam Hussein’s regime was developing nuclear arms as well as chemical and biological weapons.

However, an extensive search by the US-led Iraq Survey Group, some 1,400 scientists, military and intelligence experts, has failed to uncover any weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Perricos, the acting chief of UNMOVIC, also believed it was now difficult to believe WMDs ever existed in the run-up to this year’s war.

"It’s becoming more and more difficult to believe stocks were there," he said, adding it was unlikely Saddam could have done a good job of quickly destroying them before the war and covering his tracks.

He said many questions remain about why Saddam never tried to convince the UN teams Iraq was WMD-free.

"We are all interested to know ... why they behaved as they behaved. Why were they always building questions in our minds rather than trying to clarify things?"

The comments from the two experts is further embarrassment to President George Bush, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, who have come under increasing pressure to prove Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

"Time will tell," Mr Blair’s official spokesman said in London yesterday in response to Mr Blix’s comments. "We have to exercise a bit of patience and recognise the Survey Group has been operational for a matter of some weeks. And clearly there is a lot of work to get through," Mr Blair’s spokesman commented.

But Menzies Campbell MP, the Liberal Democrat shadow foreign secretary, said: "Dr Blix’s publicly expressed belief that Iraq destroyed the majority of its weapons of mass destruction some ten years ago is a further blow to the credibility of the government’s case for war.

"Even at its highest, that case depended on a single source and related to battlefield weapons. The UK and the British people in truth were never at risk."