THE United States’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq declared yesterday that his hunt for illicit weapons is over and that none has been found.

In his final report, Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, formed in May 2003, added that he had found no evidence that illegal weapons were smuggled from Iraq to Syria before the US-led invasion.

“After more than 18 months, the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,” he concluded.

The US and Britain used allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction as a key justification for invading the country in 2003.

Another was the introduction of democracy to a country terrorised by the regime of Saddam Hussein. The ousting of the dictator led to the country’s first free elections for decades and last night, three months after the polls, officials said that the Prime Minister had completed talks to form his cabinet and would ask Parliament to approve it today.

Presenting his WMD report yesterday, Mr Duelfer issued several warnings. He said that Saddam had wanted to restart WMD programmes and had created a pool of weapons experts, many of whom would be seeking work. Most would probably turn to the “benign civil sector”, but the danger remained that “hostile foreign governments, terrorists or insurgents may seek Iraqi expertise”.

He said that forces in Iraq may find a few degraded chemical weapons, most likely abandoned after the 1991 Gulf War. In an insurgent’s hands, “the use of a single even ineffectual chemical weapon would likely cause more terror than deadlier conventional explosives”. He added that potential nuclear-related equipment was “missing from heavily damaged and looted sites”.

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