"They may still find something. But the more time passes, the greater is the possibility that no weapons of mass destruction exist there," Blix told the news weekly Visao.

He said: "The greater the number of authorities which coalition inspectors have interviewed, each with higher levels of responsibility than the last, without finding weapons, the more likely it is that they do not exist or that only a few remain."

Coalition forces have so failed to find any trace of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a full eight weeks after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, even though they control the entire country.

US and British leaders have come under mounting pressure to prove their often repeated claims that Baghdad possessed banned weapons and needed to be disarmed by force.

"As far as I know the Iraqi authorities who are in custody have so far not revealed that the country still had arms," said Blix, adding that much of the intelligence which Washington and London used to justify the war on Iraq was shaky, including information which was provided to the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq to help them in their search for weapons.

"We were told of locations where we may find banned weapons. We went there and only in three of them did we find anything of interest, and even then they were not weapons of mass destruction," he said.

"We concluded that the information provided by the intelligence services of the United States and other nations was not solid."

Both the CIA and the Pentagon have strongly denied allegations that they manipulated reports on Iraq in order to justify the war.

Top committees in the US Congress are soon to hold an inquiry into the matter, in which key US ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also embroiled, with a British parliamentary committee to hold its own investigation.

Both have denied reports that they fabricated an excuse for going to war.

Blix said in his latest quarterly report, which he will formally present to the UN Security Council on Thursday, that UN inspectors had found no evidence that Iraq had resumed production of weapons which were banned under UN sanctions after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The inspectors withdrew from Iraq on March 17, three days ahead of the US-led invasion.

WAR.WIRE