BRITAIN: Iraq weapons expert Dr 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 yesterday.
The diplomat recounted the premonition at the inquiry headed by Lord Hutton into the apparent suicide of Dr Kelly, who was brought into a row over whether Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair's inner circle hyped evidence about Iraq's weapons capability to win support for the war.
Mr 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, Lord Hutton announced yesterday.
Former UN arms inspector Dr Kelly, who was found with his wrist cut in woodlands near his home last month, told diplomat Mr David Broucher in February that 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," Mr Broucher told the inquiry.
Mr Broucher said he asked what would happen if Iraq was attacked despite Dr Kelly's assurances. "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," Mr Broucher said.
"I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines."
Mr Broucher said Dr 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".
He said Dr Kelly, who was the source for a BBC reporter's accusations that Mr 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."
The most dramatic section of the September 2002 dossier said Saddam could unleash chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes. But Mr Broucher said Dr Kelly appeared unconvinced.
"He felt if the Iraqis had any bio-weapons left they would not have very much." Dr 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.
The Hutton inquiry has heard a series of damaging revelations for Mr Blair, including a memo from his chief of staff saying the September dossier failed to prove that Saddam was a threat.
Earlier, the inquiry heard Dr Kelly was "shocked" to be named as the source of BBC claims that Number 10 "sexed up" intelligence on Iraq.
The scientist told a trusted contact he was assured "it would all be confidential" after admitting meeting BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
Officials insist Dr Kelly was "content" to be named, and publicly he had said Ministry of Defence bosses had been "pretty good about it".
However, privately he told Sunday Times journalist Nick Rufford, whom he had known for six years: "I have been through the wringer."
Defence Secretary Mr Geoff Hoon has already faced criticism over the strategy the MoD adopted when Dr Kelly admitted he had met Mr Gilligan.
Journalists yesterday told the inquiry they were able to produce a list of suspects from Internet searches using clues dropped by government officials.
Mr Hoon's department took the unusual step of confirming or rejecting names put to them, a move officials said was only fair to the small number of other experts matching the description.
However, Michael Evans, of The Times, told the inquiry Dr Kelly was the 21st name on his list.