Iraqi war was illegal, says Former UN inspector Blix

The UN's former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has said it is his "firm view" that the Iraq war was illegal. Dr Blix told the Iraq inquiry the UK had sought to go down the "UN route" to deal with Saddam Hussein but failed.

While his team discovered prohibited items such as missiles beyond the permitted range, missile engines and a stash of undeclared documents, he said these were "fragments" and not "very important" in the bigger picture.

Asked about the inspections he oversaw between November 2002 and 18 March 2003 - when his team was forced to pull out of Iraq on the eve of the war - he said he was "looking for smoking guns" but did not find any.

"We carried out about six inspections per day over a long period of time.

"All in all, we carried out about 700 inspections at different 500 sites and, in no case, did we find any weapons of mass destruction," BBC News quoted him as saying.

Although Iraq failed to comply with some of its disarmament obligations, he added it "was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they did not have any".

As head of the UN's Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) between 1999 and 2003, Dr Blix was a key figure in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion as he sought to determine the extent of Saddam's weapons program.