LONDON, Sept 4: A senior British judge ended the first stage of his inquiry into the suicide of Iraq weapons expert David Kelly on Thursday with a warning that no party to the affair could assume they were safe from criticism.

Lord Hutton, who has quizzed Prime Minister Tony Blair, his defence minister and top aides, said he would be recalling some witnesses for searching cross-examination when he resumes the investigation into Kelly’s death on Sept 15.

Dr Kelly slashed his wrist in July after admitting he briefed a BBC reporter who accused Mr Blair’s government of exaggerating the danger from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in a dossier setting out the case for invading Iraq.

The report triggered a furious row between the government — already under fire over the failure to find any banned weapons in Iraq since the war — and the public broadcaster.

Lord Hutton’s inquiry has looked into preparation of the dossier and whether the government deliberately exposed Kelly as part of its efforts to discredit the BBC report.

“The fact that I do not recall a witness does not necessarily mean that he or she may not be subject to criticism in my report,” Lord Hutton told the inquiry.

“Therefore when it becomes known whom I intend to call in the second stage of the inquiry, speculation as to whether certain persons may or not be subject to criticism may well be ill-founded,” he said.

After four weeks of hearings which shone an unprecedented light on the inner workings of Tony Blair’s government, the BBC, and David Kelly’s own state of mind, few reputations have emerged unblemished.

The inquiry revealed that Dr Kelly was not alone in casting doubt on parts of Mr Blair’s dossier on Iraqi banned weapons, which he used to set out his case for military action.

A senior intelligence analyst told the inquiry that some of his staff believed language in the dossier was too strong and that he had concerns about a dramatic claim that Saddam could unleash chemical or biological weapons at just 45 minutes notice.

There was a tendency to “over-egg certain assessments”, weapons expert Brian Jones said, echoing the central BBC allegation that Mr Blair’s Downing Street “sexed up” the dossier.

Mr Blair gave an assured performance last week, but left a hostage to fortune when he said he accepted full responsibility for the way Dr Kelly was treated.

Days after Kelly’s death, Blair emphatically denied he authorised the leaking of his name to the media. At a news conference on Thursday he declined to say whether he would resign if Lord Hutton criticized his government.

Alastair Campbell, Blair’s chief spin doctor who announced his long-planned resignation last week, said he had no input into the contentious Iraq dossier but e-mails shown to the inquiry showed that he and several other Downing Street aides pressed for it to be as hard-hitting as possible.

Defence Minister Geoff Hoon, seen as the likely fall guy in the Kelly affair, did little to improve his chances of survival by appearing to pass all responsibility upwards to Blair or downwards to junior officials.

The BBC too is unlikely to escape criticism after standing publicly by its story even though an internal memo showed that editors believed the allegation that the dossier had been sexed up was “marred by flawed reporting”.

Even Kelly, the quiet scientist described by colleagues as a decent and honourable man, has emerged as a man who told different versions of events to different people.

In an uncomfortable grilling by a parliamentary committee just days before his death, Kelly said he did not believe he could have been the source for the BBC story.

“I could not understand some of the answers that he was giving in light of what I had known that he had said before,” fellow weapons expert Olivia Bosch told the inquiry on Thursday. —Reuters