Scientist predicted own death

Iraq weapons expert David Kelly eerily predicted his death six months ago, telling a British diplomat that if Baghdad was attacked he would be found "dead in the woods", the inquiry into his death revealed on Thursday.

The diplomat recounted the premonition at the probe into the suicide of Kelly, who was sucked into a row over whether Prime Minister Tony Blair's inner circle hyped evidence about Iraq's weapons capability to win support for the war.

Blair, facing the worst crisis of his six-year rule, is due to testify at the hearing next week and the inquiry is expected to finish taking evidence late next month.

Former UN arms inspector Kelly, who slashed his wrist in woodlands near his home last month, told diplomat David Broucher in February he advised Iraqi officials that if they co-operated with weapons inspectors "they would have nothing to fear".

"The implication was if the invasion went ahead, that would make him a liar and he would have betrayed his contacts, some of whom might be killed as a result of his actions," Broucher told the inquiry.

Broucher said he asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq was attacked. "His reply was, which I took to be a throwaway remark: 'I will be found dead in the woods'."

"I thought he might have meant that he was at risk of being attacked by the Iraqis in some way," Broucher said. "I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines."

Broucher said Kelly felt he was in "personal difficulty or embarrassment over this because he felt the invasion might go ahead anyway and somehow this put him in a morally ambiguous position".

Less than a month after his conversation with the diplomat, US and British forces invaded Iraq, saying Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had missed a last chance to prove he had scrapped his weapons of mass destruction programmes.

Four months after Saddam's overthrow, no such weapons have been found in Iraq.

Broucher said Kelly, who was the source for a BBC reporter's accusations that Blair's Government "sexed up" a dossier making the case for war, believed British intelligence services had come under pressure to produce compelling evidence.

"He said there had been a lot of pressure to make the dossier as robust as possible, that every judgment in the dossier had been robustly fought over," he said.

The most dramatic section of the September 2002 dossier said Saddam could unleash chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes.

But Broucher said Kelly appeared unconvinced. "He felt if the Iraqis had any bio-weapons left they would not have very much." Kelly also believed that deadly poisons "would be kept separately from the munitions and that this meant that the weapons could not be used quickly," he said.

- REUTERS

Hutton inquiry website

British Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee transcript:

Evidence of Dr David Kelly

Key players in the 'sexed-up dossier' affair

Herald Feature: Iraq