I don't know about WMD, admits Blair

Tony Blair today admitted he did not know whether any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would ever be found.

The British Prime Minister said he was right to act on intelligence that Saddam Hussein had retained his arsenal.

But the weapons had not been at sites where military chiefs expected to find them and they might never be found, Mr Blair said.

“I do not know is the answer,” he told BBC1’s Breakfast with Frost.

“I believe that we will but I agree there were many people who thought we were going to find this in the course of the actual operation.”

Mr Blair added: “We were looking for Saddam Hussein, who was an individual on the move about whom we had reasonable intelligence … and yet it took us six months to find him.

“In a land mass twice the size of the UK it may well not be surprising you don’t find where this stuff is hidden.”

Mr Blair again insisted the Iraq Survey Group had already uncovered evidence of secret Iraqi weapons programmes.

Paul Bremer, the US official charged with running Iraq, last month rejected Mr Blair’s claim that the ISG had unearthed “massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories”.

However, Mr Blair said today: “What they have found already is a whole raft of evidence about clandestine operations that should have been disclosed to the United Nations, a network.”

The PM added: “You can’t be definitive at the moment about what has happened.

“You are entitled to ask what was the point of having all these elaborate concealment mechanisms if there was nothing to conceal.”