UNITED NATIONS, Jan 9: Chief inspector Hans Blix informed the UN Security Council on Thursday his teams had so far found no “smoking gun” in Iraq, but at the same time added Baghdad had failed to answer “many questions” about its weapons programmes. Iraq said it would answer them.

Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, also reported to the council on Thursday.

“To date, no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities has been detected, although not all of the laboratory results of sample analysis are yet available,” ElBaradei said.

Washington appeared unimpressed with Blix’s double-edged comments.

“The problem with guns that are hidden is you can’t see their smoke,” a White House spokesman told reporters. “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”

Talking to reporters before presenting his findings to the UN security council, Blix said: “We have now been there for some two months and been covering the country in ever wider sweeps and we haven’t found any smoking guns.”

Blix and Mr ElBaradei are scheduled to update the council on the inspections process under way in Iraq.

Asked whether inspectors were getting significant intelligence from the United States, Blix said: “Well, we are getting intelligence from several sources and I will not go into the operative part of that, but it’s clear that this will be helpful in the future to us.”

“We have gone to, I think, about 125 sites already, and some of them were not visited before, and there will be more. And as more intelligence comes in, there will be more sites visited. I’m confident that we will get more intelligence.”

Earlier US Secretary of State Colin Powell told The Washington Post in an interview that over the last few days, the United States had begun giving inspectors “significant intelligence” to enable them become “more aggressive and to be more comprehensive in the work they’re doing”.

In his previous statements Blix said the inspectors needed intelligence from other nations because Iraq’s weapons declaration left so many unanswered questions that it was impossible to verify its claim of having no weapons of mass destruction.

Blix reiterated that Iraq’s weapons declaration was incomplete. “We think that the declaration failed to answer a great many questions.”

ElBaradei had said on Monday that after two months of inspections it was still too early to determine whether Saddam Hussein’s government was trying to develop nuclear weapons.

“We are not certain of Iraq’s (nuclear) capability,” he said.

However, the most crucial council meeting likely to determine Iraq’s fate is scheduled for Jan 27, when Blix is submit to the UN a formal report.