Tiblisi (Georgia): US (United States) Secretary of State Colin Powell has held out the possibility that pre-war Iraq may not have possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Powell was asked about comments last week 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," Powell said yesterday (Jan 24, 2004) as he travelled to this former Soviet Republic to attend the inauguration of President-elect Mikhail Saakashvili today (Jan 25, 2004).

Powell acknowledged that the United States thought that the deposed 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?"

A senior Bush administration official said yesterday from Davos, Switzerland, where Vice President Dick Cheney was addressing political and business leaders, that only time will tell the accuracy of pre-war US intelligence on Iraq's weapons programmes.

"We won't know until we've gotten through the process of interviewing all the people who were involved in those programmes and an opportunity to inspect all the sites until we've completed the efforts that Kay started and that somebody else now will have to finish," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.