LONDON, July 10: An independent inquiry is to report next week that Britain's foreign secretary Jack Straw overruled senior advisors on the legality of the Iraq war, a London newspaper said on Friday.

The Evening Standard newspaper said the inquiry, called by Prime Minister Tony Blair to look into the intelligence behind his decision to take Britain into the Iraq war, will heap criticism on several officials.

It said its findings would "highlight serious unease" amongst government lawyers over whether the March 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein's regime was as legal as Blair's administration claimed.

In particular, the report is to say that Straw was warned by Foreign Office legal experts in the fall of 2002 that an invasion would need a final, explicit UN Security Council resolution in order for it to be legal.

But Straw, a lawyer by training, and a central figure in Britain joining the US invasion of Iraq, "used his ministerial authority to override their advice" and insist that existing UN resolutions were sufficient, the newspaper said.

The Evening Standard did not give the source of its front-page story, the latest in a number of reports in the British press in recent days on what is likely to be in the inquiry's findings.

A Foreign Office spokesman declined to comment, saying it would not speculate on the inquiry's findings before their publication.-AFP