The justification for the Iraq war came under fresh doubt today amid a report that UN weapons inspectors believe Saddam Hussein had no significant weapons of mass destruction after 1994.
The claim, made in an US newspaper by two unnamed UN diplomats, comes weeks after former US chief weapons inspector David Kay said he no longer thought WMDs would be found in Iraq.
The diplomats were citing a report by weapons inspectors that will be presented to the United Nations today. It is expected to go before the Security Council by as early as Friday.
If the diplomats' claims are correct, the weapons report would go further than pre-war UN reports, which said that while no WMDs had been found, Iraq had not fully accounted for weapons it was known to have had at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
The new report is based on information gathered over more than seven years of UN inspections in Iraq, up to 2003, as well as post-war findings disclosed by Dr Kay. Its findings were reported by the USA Todaynewspaper.
Dr Kay stepped down in January from his post as the head of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching for WMDs since the end of the war.
After his resignation he told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense.
"And it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarised chemical and biological weapons there."
Dr Kay blamed intelligence failures for the "wrong" pre-war conclusion that WMDs were hidden in Iraq. "It turns out we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that's most disturbing," he said.
Within days, President George W. Bush announced a commission of inquiry, saying he was "determined to figure out why" stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction had not been found in Iraq.