"The idea that there is some big arsenal of weapons that posed that real and present danger which we haven't found does not seem to me credible," Cook, who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Iraq policy, told the BBC.

"Parliament voted for war because it was told that (former Iraqi President) Saddam (Hussein) did have real weapons of mass destruction," Cook said.

"Indeed what the prime minister said on the eve of the war was that the weapons posed a real and present danger, either because (Saddam) might use them or because he might pass them to terrorist groups," he said.

"We were told it was so urgent that we went to war," Cook added, arguing that it would have been better to have given the UN weapons inspectors more time to finish their job, rather than rushing to war.

"To establish that that's correct, you do have to produce the weapons, you do have to actually produce the factories, you cannot now say, well there were some scientists around who might at some time have had the capacity to develop it. That was not what Parliament was being told in March when it voted for war," Cook stressed.

Cook's comments came as the BBC quoted some senior British government figures as reporting that they no longer believe weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.

The BBC said that "very senior sources" in the government ruled out the possibility of finding the weapons, though they believe that the banned weapons did exist but were hidden or destroyed by Saddam before the US-led war against his country.

A parliamentary committee investigating the government's handling of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons concluded Monday that "the jury is still out" on government claims that Saddam possessed banned arms.

However, Blair, who has been under great pressure over the failure by coalition forces to find any banned weapons in Iraq, still insisted that he has absolutely no doubt at all that the coalition would find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programs.

(Xinhua News Agency July 11, 2003)