David Kelly thought there was a 15 per cent chance that Iraq had a continuing biological warfare programme, a fellow weapons inspector has told The Times.

The British bio-weapons expert, whose death sparked the Hutton inquiry, made the remark to an Australian colleague in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war during a visit to UN headquarters in May 2003.

Peter Prosser disclosed the conversation after completing his service as a bio-weapons inspector when the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission on Iraq was wound up this month.

“He said, ‘Before the war, what was your assessment?’. I said there may be a 15 per cent chance they may have something,” Dr Prosser recalled. “He said, ‘I think about the same. I think about 15 per cent’ – which really means there is an 85 per cent chance there wasn’t anything. We didn’t think we were going to find truckloads of missiles. It was really: have they kept something?”

Dr Kelly killed himself on July 17, 2003, after being named as the alleged source of a story blaming Britain’s decision to go to war on “sexed-up” intelligence reports. There is one tantalising document hidden in the UN archive that raises some question about Dr Kelly’s position, sources say.

The single page of “Closing Remarks” was handwritten by him at the end of a bio-weapons inspection in July 1998. It was so favourable to the Iraqis that they presented it to Hans Blix, the Unmovic chairman, in crisis meetings in February 2003. “It’s a completely different assessment than anyone would think of the programme,” a former UN inspector said.

Even after writing the document, Dr Kelly often repeated his suspicions of Iraq in private UN meetings. The one-page document was not mentioned in Unmovic’s “Compendium” of its work because officials discounted its significance.

“One thing Iraq used to say after you did an inspection was, ‘We really want [to establish our] cooperation’, another former inspector said. “David at one stage was obliged to say we have found nothing inconsistent and we have checked up on all facilites and we found nothing remaining. That was done out of a courtesy.

“They were always badgering us, saying, ‘We have cooperated, we need a tick in the box’. It was at the end of this mission. We went to all of these places and there was nothing inconsistent with what Iraq had told us. For that inspection, that may have been his own experience. But I do not believe if we could resurrect David he would give them a clean bill of health. There were always inconsistencies.”

Word for word

"I don't concede it at all that the intelligence at the time was wrong. I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes"

Tony Blair in evidence to Commons Liaison Committee, July 8, 2003

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