In an interview broadcast a day after his swansong briefing to the UN Security Council in New York, Blix told BBC television that, in the run-up to the US-led war to oust Saddam Hussein, his inspectors were promised the best US and British information available.

But he added: "Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction -- and that shook me a bit, I must say."

"I thought, 'My God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?'"

Blix's remarks added to a furore in Britain over whether Prime Minister Tony Blair's staff embellished a dossier last September on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction so as to beef up the case for military action.

Blair strongly denies the charge, and has told parliament's intelligence and security committee to clear the air, as a US-led team deploys in Iraq this weekend to dig up evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

On Friday, BBC radio quoted a source "close to British intelligence" that the government's Joint Intelligence Committee was asked "six or eight times" to redraft the dossier before it was made public.

It was the public broadcaster which aired the original allegation: that the dossier's claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in just 45 minutes was inserted at Downing Street's behest over the reservations of senior intelligence figures.

On Thursday, in what was likely his final report to the Security Council before he retires, Blix said "there remain long lists of items unaccounted for" among the weapons programs that Iraq claimed to have abandoned more than a decade earlier under UN pressure.

"But it is not justified to jump to the conclusion that something exists just because it is unaccounted for," he added.

Speaking to reporters afterwards, Blix cast doubt on the authority of the US and British experts who will be resuming the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

"I do not want to question the integrity or the professionalism of the inspectors of the coalition," he said.

"But anybody who functions under an army of occupation cannot have the same credibility as an independent inspector."

The former Swedish foreign minister said he felt "disappointed" at the way the United States and Britain started the war without letting his UN Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) finish its work.

Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, the coalition partners have failed to produce hard evidence of the weapons programs that were the official reason for their invasion.

In Geneva, former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, an outspoken critic of the war, was quoted as urging Washington and London to "acknowledge their lies" about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.

Speaking to the French-language Swiss newspaper Le Temps, Ritter said Saddam's regime could not have destroyed all its weapons of mass destruction "without leaving traces."

He challenged Blair and US President George W. Bush "to explain frankly and honestly why they went to war.... If it was a noble crusade to free the world of a mad dictator, they should say so."

WAR.WIRE