London: In a major embarrassment to Prime Minister Tony Blair, an official British inquiry today (July 14, 2004) criticised the country's pre-war intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction saying it was "open to doubt" and "seriously flawed".

In its 196-page report, the panel headed by former civil servant Lord Robin Butler also criticised the Blair Government's controversial dossier on Iraqi weapons, published in the run up to war, saying that it went to the "outer limits" of the available intelligence.

It said Blair's statement in the Commons may have "reinforced the impression" that there was "fuller and firmer" intelligence behind the assessments in the dossier than was actually the case.

The damning report, which contradicted Blair's key claim, said when British Government began considering military action against Iraq in March 2002, the intelligence was "insufficiently robust" to justify claims that Iraq was in breach of United Nations resolutions requiring it to disarm.

Iraq "did not have significant, if any, stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment or developed plans for using them", it said.

Hours after the report was out, Blair told the Parliament he "accepts" the findings of the inquiry and admitted that British intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was "less certain, less founded than was stated at the time".