WASHINGTON, July 6: The Central Intelligence Agency failed to pass on to President George W. Bush before the Iraq war information from relatives of Iraqi scientists that Baghdad had abandoned its programme to develop weapons of mass destruction , the New York Times reported on its website on Monday.

Citing unnamed government officials, the newspaper said the existence of a secret prewar CIA operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists - and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers - had been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq after US and British troops failed to uncover any alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons the Bush administration used to justify the war.

The report, which is expected to be released this week, will likely contain a scathing indictment of the CIA and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons, the report said.

CIA officials played down the significance of the information, saying only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programmes were dead, according to the Times.

The Senate report concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programmes.

The document cites instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence in order to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programmes. -AFP