British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair is today facing accusations that Downing Street had plagiarised its latest dossier of evidence against Saddam Hussein from out-of-date material.
Downing Street insisted the dossier released on Monday was "accurate" and had never claimed exclusive authorship.
The dossier was designed to help win over sceptics by outlining Iraq's alleged efforts to hide its weapons of mass destruction.
But experts dismissed the dossier as largely copied from three different articles, Channel 4 Newsreported.
One article, which the programme claimed was a major source for the Downing Street document was written by a postgraduate student, Mr Ibrahim al-Marashi, from Monterey, California. He was researching material relating to the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War and not to the current situation, it was alleged.
Channel 4 Newsreported that Mr Glen Rangwala, an academic at Cambridge University, spotted that large chunks of the student's paper had been copied to form parts of the No 10 dossier, called, "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment Deception and Intimidation".
Dr Rangwala, a lecturer in politics, told the programme: "The British Government's dossier is 19 pages long and most of pages 6 to 16 are copied directly from that document word for word, even the grammatical errors and typographical mistakes".
A Downing Street spokesman said: "The report was put together by a range of government officials. As the report itself makes clear, it was drawn from `a number of sources including intelligence material.'".
But international affairs expert Mr Dan Plesch told Channel 4 Newsthat the alleged plagiarism was "scandalous". He said it was "dressed up as the best MI6 and our other international partners can produce on Saddam".
PA