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Former chief of UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix said British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a "fundamental mistake" in claiming that Iraqi ousted President Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, Britain's Independent newspaper reported on Sunday.
Asked whether he thought Blair was wrong about the "45 minute" claim made in the government's Iraq weapons dossier last September, Blix told the paper, "I think that was a fundamental mistake. I do not know exactly how they calculated this figure of 45 minutes ... This seems pretty far off the mark to me."
"It seems to me highly unlikely that there were any means of delivering biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes," the paper quoted Blix as saying.
Commenting on whether Blair had relied on flawed intelligence in the run-up to the US-led war against Iraq, Blix told the paper, "They overinterpreted the intelligence they had."
Blix, who retired last month as head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), also called for the UN inspectors to return to Iraq to research the country's banned weapons, saying there would be "greater credibility in having international inspectors rather than national ones."
The UN inspectors left Iraq in March before the United States launched war against Iraq on March 20. They have been denied to resume their work in Iraq as the United States and Britain have set up the Iraq Survey Group to search for evidence of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The United States and Britain launched war against Iraq on the grounds that Iraq's banned weapons posed a serious threat, but the failure so far to find those weapons has caused a turmoil over the case made for war.
Critics have accused the Bush administration and Blair's office of misleading the public by exaggerating the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Iraq.
(Xinhua News Agency July 14, 2003)
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