A collection of weapons, ammunition and listening devices dating from the Saddam era has been discovered in a safe at the Iraqi Embassy in London, police confirmed today.

The trove, which includes machine guns, pistols, silencers and electric goads, was found by the new Iraqi Ambassador to London, Dr Salah Al Shaikhly, when he searched the building, which was abandoned by the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The find was first reported on BBC Radio's Today programme and confirmed this morning by a spokesman at Scotland Yard.

"The current Iraqi authorities informed police of the discovery of a number of firearms found within their premises in south west London," said the spokesman.

"They co-operated fully with UK authorities, including the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and a number of firearms were subsequently recovered. Our investigations are continuing."

The police would not say when the weapons were found, but Dr Al Shaikhly told Today that he came across the cache after picking his way through the embassy in Knightsbridge. The building had been looted by burglars several times after diplomats for Hussein's regime fled the UK in early 2003, but they could not break into twenty or so safes found in different parts of the embassy. Dr Al Shaikhly called in professional safe breakers to find out what was inside.

"As it turned out, most of them were empty apart from one interesting safe, locked in the Iraqi security services, which is upstairs," Dr Al Shaikhly told BBC Radio. The safe turned out to hold four machine guns, including a Kalashnikov and an Uzi submachine gun, as well as 10 other pistols and four silencers. There were also cameras, bugging devices and electric rods.

"It was amazing. You really despair when you have this kind of arsenal kept at the Iraq embassy," Dr Al Shaikhly said. "There was something like 300 rounds of ammunition and another 300 that was spent. They must have used it for training. There were also some other things that looked like electric cattle prods."

The ambassador speculated that his predecessors might have been spying on employees at the Iraqi embassy.

"Such was the regime they did not trust anybody. Everybody was spying on everybody else, unfortunately," said Dr Al Shaikhly, stressing that he had been pleased to hand over the safe's contents to the police: "We do not need that. Not only do we not have it, but even if we did we don’t know how to use it."

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