"I stand by entirely the claim that was made last September," Blair told parliament, referring to the allegation in the British government dossier published in the build up to the Iraq war.

Doubt was cast on the claim after the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) -- the United Nations nuclear watchdog -- said in February that documents it received relating to the claim were forged.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said that a reference to the claim -- which came from Britain's MI6 intelligence agency -- should not have been included in a key speech by US President George W. Bush.

Bush said in his State of the Union speech on January 28 that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The CIA dispatched a former senior diplomat, Joseph Wilson, to Niger to investigate the claim and received a report from him saying the allegations were false.

But London has stood by the allegation, insisting that the intelligence was not MI6's own and was based on information received from a foreign intelligence service which they could not share with the American CIA.

"The intelligence on which we based this was not the so-called forged documents that have been put to the IAEA, and the IAEA have accepted that they got no such forged documents from British intelligence," Blair said.

"We had independent intelligence to the effect," Blair added.

Blair said that it was not "beyond the bounds of possibility" as Iraq had in the 1980s purchased over 270 tonnes of uranium from Niger.

Blair's staunch defence of the allegation came the day after a parliamentary committee examining the government's presentation of its case for military action wrote to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for more answers on Niger.

WAR.WIRE