The United States and Britain should give United Nations weapons inspectors more intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, chief inspector Hans Blix said today.
"If the UK and the US ... have evidence, then one would expect that they would be able to tell us where this stuff is," Mr Blix told BBC radio.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday accused Iraq of "deception" and "lying" in the 12,000-page weapons inventory it handed to the UN.
In his first appraisal of the dossier, Mr Blix noted that Iraq maintained it had no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs "and that none have been designed, procured, produced or stored" since the last inspections regime ended four years ago. Mr Blix said that western governments claimed to have evidence to the contrary, but that inspectors were currently not in a position "to confirm Iraq's statements, nor in possession of evidence to disprove it." The inspectors "don't get all the support we need" from western governments, he said.
"The most important thing that governments like the U.K. (United Kingdom) or the US could give us would be to tell us sites where they are convinced that they keep some weapons of mass destruction," he said. "This is what we want to have.
"They have all the methods to listen to telephone conversations, they have spies, they have satellites, so they have a lot of sources which we do not have," he added.
In an exclusive interview in the Guardian today, Tony Blair said Saddam was playing "hide and seek" with UN weapons inspectors - and that the United Nations would decide whether Iraq had breached the UN resolution.
The United States has declared Iraq in "material breach" of the UN Security Council's resolution.
Mr Blair said weapons inspectors "will, as it were, state the facts." "The judgment as to the seriousness of the facts is obviously a matter for the nations of the UN," he told the Guardian.
"Now he (Saddam) has made his declaration, if his declaration turns out to be false then he is in breach."