LONDON, Aug 1: The new head of Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6 tried to persuade weapons inspectors in Iraq to harden up a report on their search for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), a British newspaper reported on Sunday.

According to the Mail on Sunday, John Scarlett sent a confidential email to the head of the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) on March 8 this year with a list of 10 claims, which had already been shown to be untrue, for possible inclusion in the report.

At the time Scarlett, who takes up the top job at MI6 this week, was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which co-ordinates Britain's spying efforts.

The 10 "golden nuggets" suggested by Scarlett included claims that Iraq had a secret smallpox programme, that Iraq had developed mobile chemical weapons laboratories and that the country possessed or was building a "rail gun" for use in nuclear weapons research, according to the Mail on Sunday.

The paper quoted an unnamed member of the ISG as saying: "Inclusion of Scarlett's nuggets would have been grossly manipulative of the truth. In fact, let's face it, he wanted us to include lies.

"This was a blatant attempt by the highly influential and respected British intelligence chief to insert material into our report which we knew for a hard fact was totally untrue.

"Everything Scarlett wanted in was based on very old evidence which we had painstakingly investigated and shown to be false." According to the newspaper, Scarlett's suggestions were rejected.

But pressure from the United States and Britain led to the ISG producing only a bland 20-page document rather than a detailed 200-page analysis of the failure of their 1,400-strong team to find any trace of WMD in Iraq, it said.

Scarlett was a central figure in the row over the British government's justification for the war on Iraq. As head of the JIC, he was ultimately responsible for a contentious government dossier on alleged WMDs, published in September 2002.

Last month an official British inquiry found that Britain joined the war in Iraq based on evidence that was at times "seriously flawed" and "unreliable". However, the September 2002 dossier showed "no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence", the inquiry concluded. -AFP