"What we can say is that the description of the man found there matches the description of Dr David Kelly," a police spokesman said, although the formal identification of the body will not take place until Saturday.

Police said they were treating the case as an "unexplained death" but a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was on a plane between the United States and Japan, said that the defence ministry would launch a full judicial inquiry if the body proved to be Kelly's.

The corpse was found on Harrowdown Hill, five miles from Kelly's house in the English countryside, west of London. Kelly disappeared on Thursday afternoon, two days after facing a grilling by a parliamentary committee investigating the affair.

Kelly, 59, has been named as the possible source behind a BBC report which alleged the British government had "sexed up" its dossier on Baghdad's arms capabilities ahead of the war on Iraq.

His appearance before the committee had prompted an angry reaction from MPs sitting on it, who claimed that he had been "set up" by the defence ministry.

The microbiologist admitted he had met BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan a week before he broadcast his story but he said he did not think he could have been the source for the story, which became the subject of a bitter row between the government, the BBC and critics of the war on Iraq.

Kelly, a former UN weapons inspector who had worked in Iraq, had alluded during questioning by the foreign affairs select committee to the intense pressure he was under amid the fierce media interest in the affair.

Tom Mangold, a television journalist and close friend, said he had spoken to Kelly's wife Janice earlier Friday.

"She told me he had been under considerable stress, that he was very very angry about what had happened at the committee, that he wasn't well, that he had been to a safe house, he hadn't liked that, he wanted to come home," Mangold said.

"She didn't use the word depressed, but she said he was very very stressed and unhappy about what had happened and this was really not the kind of world he wanted to live in," Mangold said.

Kelly was first named as the possible mole in The Times newspaper on July 10. The defence ministry confirmed that he had come forward as a contact of Gilligan when the newspaper's first edition was published late on July 9.

Opposition Conservative MP Richard Ottaway who was on the committee said it would be a "tragedy of ghastly proportions" if "political machinations" had resulted in Kelly's death.

"The political ramifications, if the body is Dr Kelly ... are serious. People are beginning to get edgy about the government and losing their faith in it. People don't trust it any more," Ottaway said.

"And now that political machinations have actually, or could have, resulted in the death of a potentially important person in this whole thing, I don't think this will help the government one iota," he said.

In his report in May, Gilligan claimed Alastair Campbell, the government's director of communications and a key aide to Blair, had ordered that the claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in as little as 45 minutes, be inserted into a government dossier released in September.

The report sparked a furious row with the government and prompted the official parliamentary inquiry into the intelligence that was presented by Downing Street as a justification for joining the US-led war on Iraq in March.

The furore over the arms expert's death came a day after Blair delivered a key address to the US Congress in Washington in which he asserted that "history will forgive" the United States and Britain for waging war on Iraq even if, in the end, it remains unproven whether Baghdad was developing weapons of mass destruction.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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