Powell joins growing list of Iraq sceptics

US SECRETARY of State Colin Powell held out the possibility that pre-war Iraq may not have possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Powell was asked about comments made by David Kay, the outgoing leader of a US weapons search team in Iraq, that he did not believe Iraq had large quantities of chemical or biological weapons.

"The answer to that question is, we don't know yet," Mr Powell said.

He acknowledged that the US thought deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had banned weapons, but added: "We had questions that needed to be answered.

"What was it?" he asked. "One hundred tons, 500 tons or zero tons? Was it so many litres of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing?"

Britain's Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell said: "The cast of sceptics and disbelievers grows more illustrious every day. Added to Hans Blix and David Kay, we now have Colin Powell himself.

"Nearly 12 months after Britain went to war against Iraq, the Government's case for doing so has not been proved."

Almost a year has passed since Mr Powell's speech before the UN Security Council in which he accused Iraq of violating a UN weapons ban.

Since then, President George W Bush's administration has been less categorical on the issue, stating that Saddam was actively pursuing banned weapons. The administration has avoided the issue of actual possession.

Mr Bush, in his State of the Union address last Tuesday, cited an interim report by Mr Kay in October in which the inspector claimed to have found dozens of weapons-related programmes in Iraq.

Those programmes would be continuing if the US had not acted to oust Saddam's government, the president explained.

Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview last Wednesday, said the administration had not given up on the search for weapons. "The jury is still out," he said.