British Prime Minister Tony Blair is fooling himself if he thinks weapons of mass destruction will still be found in Iraq, David Kay, the former head of the US-British Iraq Survey Group (ISG), said yesterday.

"Anyone out there holding — as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said — the prospect that the ISG is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction are really delusional," former chief weapons hunter Kay told BBC radio.

"There was a programme there. There was an intention of Saddam Hussein at some point to reconstitute it... but there are not actual stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," he said.

The issue of weapons of mass

destruction (WMD) has dogged Blair since he told the British parliament in April 2002 that there was "no doubt at all that the development of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein poses a severe threat, not just to the region but to the wider world."

Blair used that alleged threat as a justification for the US-led war in Iraq in March 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.

In his interview, Kay repeated his assertion that the WMD evoked by both Blair and US President George W. Bush in the build-up to war did not exist.

"We simply got it wrong. There were actually no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was a dangerous country, Saddam was an evil man and we are better off without him and all of that. But we were wrong in our estimation", he said.