Thursday, January 13 2005 09:43 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: The United States has ended its physical search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, which was cited by the first administration of President George W Bush as the main reason for invading the country, the White House has said.

"The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) has 'essentially ended' its physical search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters yesterday 9Jan 12, 2005).

McClellan said that the ISG is still operating in Iraq, but that much of its mission is "focused elsewhere now", including the investigation of documents from the former Iraqi regime.

"There are thousands and thousands of pages of documents that they were able to recover that were part of the basis for the previous report that chief US weapons inspector Charles Duelfer released," he said, adding, "Much of the ISG's physical search has essentially ended."

The Duelfer report, released in October 2004, concluded, "The weapons that we all believed were there based on the intelligence were not there" and "much of that accumulative body of intelligence" compiled by the US and its allies over the 12-year period leading to the March 2003 military action "was wrong".

"We need to find out why and we need to take steps to correct those flaws," McClellan said.