LONDON: Britain and the United States have bypassed the United Nations to establish a secret team of inspectors to resume the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it emerged on Saturday.

In a sign of the desperation in London and Washington to find a “smoking gun” to justify the war, the Anglo-American team has already conducted three inspections in the past two weeks. No banned weapons have been found so far.

The decision to set up a new group of inspectors, dubbed US-movic because they are an American-led rival to Unmovic (United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission), will infuriate the United Nations. Kofi Annan, the secretary general, pointedly reminded Britain and the US this week that Unmovic still has a mandate to carry out inspections.

The role played by the new inspectors, who set up a base in Kuwait a week before the war was launched, was disclosed to the London-based Guardian newspaper by David Kay, the former head of Unscom (United Nations Special Commission), the arms inspections team which left Iraq amid recriminations in 1998.

No mention has been made of the new group by ministers or military spokesmen, who have indicated that weapons inspections are carried out by military forces. But the group, headed by Charles Duelfer, a former deputy head of the Unscom weapons inspectors, has travelled extensively in Iraq. Unscom left Iraq in 1998 after clashes with the regime which said it had been infiltrated by spies.

It is understood that Mr Duelfer’s team was called in to inspect weapons and papers found at an airbase in Iraq’s western desert two weeks ago. In the past week it has made two separate visits to sites on the road between Kuwait and Baghdad. American and British special forces are also engaged in fierce exchanges in largely unnoticed fighting in Qaim, a strategic border town on the main route to Syria.

British defence officials last night were unusually coy about the fighting, which involved units of Iraq’s Special Republican Guard and special security services, according to senior US military sources. One possible explanation is that Iraqi forces are trying to protect material which could be used for chemical or biological weapons, or evidence of Iraq’s attempts to develop a nuclear bomb. Another is that they are defending senior members of the Iraqi regime trying to escape to Syria.

The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction after three weeks of war has raised questions about the casus belli. But British intelligence officials said it might be months before evidence were uncovered.

A cabinet minister has told the Guardian that Saddam Hussein’s failure to use chemical weapons was not an indication of their absence. They had been dismantled and their contents hidden around the country. “The regime has not had time to reassemble the things,” a British official said.

“You will not find a factory of gleaming missiles,” a source said. “They would have been broken down ages ago.” Britain and the US hope the new inspectors will approach their task with renewed vigour. The UN inspections system is widely denigrated within the Bush administration for being too cautious.

Mr Kay described the new inspectors as a “robust group of people”. “There are special forces teams that carry out [immediate] inspections.But they are not as technically based as the Kuwait team who are heavily science-based civilians.”

He said the inspectors had been drawn from beyond the ranks of former Unscom staff. “You have people drawn from national laboratories in the United States. There are a number of Brits from defence and weapons establishments.”

The decision to bypass the UN inspections route will anger Hans Blix, the UN’s chief weapons inspector. His spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said the US-led team had tried and failed to recruit some of his staff. “Dr Blix has said we are the body assigned to carry out this inspection. We believe we have the capability and the existing legal mandate.”

Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, in West Yorkshire, England, said the disclosure of the secret team would lead to a major row. “You are more likely to find what you want if you do it yourself,” he said. “If this team finds a smoking gun people will not believe it.”

The disclosure of the team is likely to embarrass British ministers, who are officially committed to allowing Unmovic a role. Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, would only say on Friday that Britain and the US have set up a “machinery” for resuming inspections. “It may take some time,” he added.

Official sources said only about one per cent of the sites where they would expect to find evidence had been investigated so far. But Admiral Sir Alan West, the first sea lord, said on Friday that claims Iraq had thousands of tons of chemical weapons and hundreds of missiles were “way over the top”.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.