US discredited my team: Blix

Chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix, faulted by Washington for not coming up with evidence of illegal weapons, has accused United States officials of deliberately seeking to discredit his team in the run-up to the Iraq war.

"I think it's been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals [London and Washington] built their case seemed to have been shaky," Blix told BBC radio in an interview, excerpts of which were broadcast on Tuesday.

Blix, who is due to address the UN Security Council later on Tuesday on his readiness to send inspectors back to Iraq, said he would not dream of accusing US and British intelligence agencies of fabricating reports on illegal arms.

But he questioned their ability to spot 'fakes' such as a report Iraq had imported tonnes of raw uranium.

"Is it not disturbing that the intelligence agencies that should have all the technical means at their disposal did not discover that this was falsified?" he said.

"I think that's very, very disturbing. Who falsifies this?" he said in the excerpts, aired ahead of the planned full broadcast on Saturday.

US and British invasion troops have failed to find nuclear, chemical or biological arms since they launched war on Iraq on March 20 and ousted its leader Saddam Hussein.

Blix also said that allegations by US officials that his team had deliberately suppressed information on an Iraqi unmanned drone plane and a cluster bomb in its report on Iraq's weapons were intended to discredit inspectors.

"At that time the US was very eager to sway the votes of the Security Council and they felt that stories about these things would be useful to have and they let it out," Blix said.

"Thereby they tried to hurt us a bit and say we'd suppressed this," he added.

Asked whether the US had leaked information to sway UN votes, he said: "It looked like that."

Blix said, however, that he did not doubt the sincerity of US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who presented a key report to the UN of Iraq's suspected banned weapons before the war.

"If you sit at the top you can't check everything," he said.