The House of Commons foreign affairs committee said reporter Andrew Gilligan had backtracked on his allegation that British Prime Minister Tony Blair's office transformed a dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction -- produced by British intelligence agencies -- a week before its release in September 2002.

"Mr Gilligan appeared to change his mind on the very grave allegation in quite a fundamental way," the committee's chairman Donald Anderson said after Gilligan faced a private committee inquiry Thursday lasting almost two hours.

Anderson said a transcript of the hearing would be made public next week.

In a BBC radio report in May, Gilligan claimed that Alastair Campbell, the government's director of communications and key Blair aide, had ordered that the headline-making claim that Iraq under Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical or biological weapons in as little as 45 minutes, be inserted into the government dossier released last September.

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

Gilligan was making his second appearance before the foreign affairs committee Thursday. He had previously described the contact for the May 29 story as a "source of longstanding and I described him in the broadcast as one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier".

Gilligan was recalled to testify in private after a senior British government official and weapons expert denied he had been the BBC's source.

"I believe I am not the main source," said David Kelly, a former weapons inspector, when grilled before the foreign affairs committee on Tuesday.

Responding to the MPs' verdict that Gilligan is an "unsatisfactory witness", the BBC said in a written statement: "We deeply resent the way the committee was used to attack Mr Gilligan's integrity."

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