NEW YORK, June 19: Chief UN weapons inspector for Iraq, Hans Blix, said in an interview here that he was amazed Washington and London expected to find large quantities of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after UN inspectors were unable to find any.

“What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons,” Blix said in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday.

“I don’t see how they could have come to such an attitude if they had, at any time, studied” existing reports by UN inspectors, he said.

“Is the United Nations on a different planet? Are reports from here totally unread south of the Hudson?” Blix asked, in reference to the river that flows through New York, where UN headquarters is based.

When asked how he felt about the US-led war that ousted the regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Blix replied: “We all welcome the disappearance of one of the world’s most horrible regimes.”

Among the negative consequences of the conflict is the fact that the United States “is further going away from the Security Council, saying this is a hopeless institution.”

After returning to Iraq after a four-year hiatus in late November, UN weapons inspectors found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, uncovering only the banned Al-Samoud 2 missiles. Baghdad went on to destroy 72 Al-Samouds.

So far, US teams deployed in Iraq since the war have found no banned chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

CONGRESS HEARINGS: In closed-door sessions on Thursday, the US Congress probed intelligence which said on the eve of the invasion that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons ready for use.