WASHINGTON, Sept 13: The US search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction may end without finding the weapons, the NBC News reported on Saturday.

The Bush administration’s point man for the search, David Kay, is returning to Washington with a status report next week but US intelligence officials told NBC News that he found “no smoking gun.”

“They thought they had discovered a biological weapons lab, but it wasn’t one,” the report said.

“A massive CIA investigation, led by former UN weapon’s inspector Mr Kay, is turning up only what former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein planned not what he produced,” the report added.

“He has not found the kinds of things the administration expected to find — large quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that were destroyed prior to the war,” David Albright, a former UN weapons’ inspector, told NBC News.

US officials told the news channel that Navy divers were beginning to search a reservoir in northern Iraq after reports of barrels at the bottom that could contain chemical weapons or missile parts.

And two former Iraqi officials have told the United States that Iraq was hiding Scud missiles in a railroad tunnel as late as 2002. But they say they were blown up before UN inspectors could find them.

Iraqis have also told the United States that Saddam Hussein planned to rebuild a nuclear programme if sanctions were lifted.

But the CIA’s best evidence so far of nuclear equipment is plans for a centrifuge, buried in a garden 12 years ago after the first Iraq war, the report said.

“The unmanned planes that the United States said could have been used to spray biological or chemical weapons were never built for that purpose,” the report says, quoting a US Air Force report.

The Director, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, US Air Force, does not agree that Iraq was developing unmanned planes to be delivery platforms for chemical and biological warfare agents.

The small size of Iraq’s unmanned planes strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance, although CBW delivery is an inherent capability,” the director said.