THE Government sought yesterday finally to bury the claim that Iraqi weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes, as British Intelligence announced that it had dropped the source of the information.

The source of another claim about Iraqi production of biological weapons agents, described only as a “liaison service”, has suffered the same fate, Jack Straw told the Commons.

But at the same time Mr Straw revealed that Hans Blix, the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector, had been shown a draft of the Government’s dossier on Iraqi weapons and had accepted — as late as September 2002, shortly before the dossier’s publication — its section on chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic weapons programmes. If anything, he believed that the dossier understated the case, documents released by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office show.

It was the first time ministers have mentioned that Dr Blix was consulted over the dossier and it is understood that Dr Blix was warned by Mr Straw that the contact would be made known to show that most of the international community believed that Saddam Hussein was a threat at the time.

The disclosure of the dropped sources means that the Secret Intelligence Service has had to withdraw three of its main lines of intelligence reporting on Iraq’s weapons before the war.

But neither Mr Straw nor Tony Blair will go further than the apologies already given over the war intelligence.

Downing Street said Mr Blair would not go beyond his statement at the time of the Butler report that he accepted responsibility for mistakes made in the intelligence gathered by America and Britain.

Officials said he had avoided the word “sorry” because it would be be misused by critics as an apology for the war itself, something Mr Blair would never be prepared to give.

Nearly 18 months after the end of the war in Iraq and days after the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, Mr Straw acknowledged that some of the information on which the Government had based its judgments about the war was wrong. However, he said that he did not accept, even with hindsight, that the Government had been wrong to act as it had, given the circumstances it faced at the time.

He said that the international community, and every one of the 15 members of the UN Security Council, had concluded at the time that Saddam posed a threat to international security.

Mr Straw said that Dr Blix had been shown a draft — not the final version — of the weapons dossier in September 2002, shortly before it was published.

According to Mr Straw: “There was a huge demand from March of 2002 for us to put before the House a summary of the intelligence we had seen. That dossier . . . accurately reflected the views of the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time.

“We sought to cross-check the dossier with many people. One of my officials in New York showed Dr Blix section six of the dossier and my official wrote: ‘On the whole Blix liked section six. He felt it did not exaggerate the facts nor revert to rhetoric’.”

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