September 4, 2003	Thursday	Rajab 6, 1424

LONDON, Sept 3: Intelligence officials voiced concern that evidence in a British government dossier on Iraq’s weapons was exaggerated, a judicial inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly was told on Wednesday.

A former official from the Ministry of Defence’s secretive intelligence wing testified that there had been fears that some statements in the Sept 2002 dossier about Iraq’s ability to produce chemical weapons had been too strong.

The evidence came in the fourth week of the inquiry in London investigating how Dr Kelly came to take his own life and plunged Prime Minister Tony Blair into the worst political crisis of his six years in power.

David Kelly was found dead in July after being publicly identified as the source of a BBC report in May alleging that Downing Street “sexed up” the dossier to reinforce the case for invading Iraq.

Mr Blair denied the allegation when he testified last Thursday, saying he would have resigned if it had been true.

The dossier notably claimed that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in as little as 45 minutes.

Brian Jones, now retired from the Defence Intelligence Staff, testified that at the time the dossier was being compiled, he was the head of a DIS scientific section looking at nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

He said some of his staff were “unhappy” at the detail in the dossier, including his leading chemical weapons expert who had complained that some of its statements “did not accurately represent the assessment of the intelligence available to him”.

Mr Jones spoke of “the tendency in certain areas, from his point of view, to, shall we say, over-egg certain assessments, particularly in relation to the production of chemical weapons”.

Jones also described a series of concerns within his department about the 45-minute claim in the September dossier. —AFP