LONDON, Sept 18: Weapons expert David Kelly should have been suspended for talking to reporters about the way intelligence was used to take Britain into the Iraq war, an inquiry into his apparent suicide heard on Thursday.

Ministry of Defence personnel director Richard Hatfield said Dr Kelly never would have found himself in the public eye had he not spoken to BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan less than two months before he took his life.

“I think it is a fundamental failing in what he did,” Mr Hatfield told Lord Brian Hutton, who is probing the circumstances behind Kelly’s death in July which hurled Prime Minister Tony Blair into his worst-ever crisis.

Richard Hatfield, recalled by Hutton to face cross-examination, defended the Ministry of Defence’s decision to let reporters guess Kelly’s identity as the source of Gilligan’s May 29 report on BBC radio.

In that broadcast, it was alleged that a Sept 2002 dossier from Mr Blair on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction had been “sexed up” with the claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in just 45 minutes.

Mr Hatfield said on Thursday: “With hindsight, I think we probably should have stopped the interview after 15 minutes, half an hour, on July 4 (when Kelly was first confronted by his superiors about the BBC report) and initiated formal disciplinary proceedings.”—AFP