Kelly probe: Cornered Blair ducks questions

British Prime Minister Tony Blair today dodged searching questions about an inquiry into the suicide of an Iraq weapons expert whose death h...

British Prime Minister Tony Blair today dodged searching questions about an inquiry into the suicide of an Iraq weapons expert whose death has plunged his government into crisis.

David Kelly killed himself after being exposed as the source of a BBC report that claimed the government had exaggerated the threat from Iraq’s banned weapons to justify war to a sceptical public. At a news conference today, Blair sought to shift the focus to his government’s domestic agenda but reporters persistently probed him about the Kelly affair. ‘‘Let the judge do the judging,’’ Blair said.

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Lord Hutton, chairing the inquiry, closed its first phase on Thursday but told witnesses that any of them could be recalled, or criticised in his report.

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Hutton said all the key players could be open to criticism. He will recall some witnesses and take further evidence, starting on September 15.

Blair said: ‘‘Let the Hutton inquiry make judgements about these things, I could go into a long and detailed answer but I won’t.’’ Blair was also grilled about British intelligence officers’ evidence about the Iraq dossier.

‘‘I could make a response to you but I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,’’ Blair said. Instead, he insisted he did the right thing in going to war and that evidence of banned weapons programmes would be found.

‘‘I’ve got no doubt that they will find evidence that those programmes were continuing well after Iraq was saying they’d been discontinued and shut down,’’ Blair said. (Reuters)

New e-mail worm blasts UK’s Iraq policy
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New e-mail worm blasts UK’s Iraq policy
z SAN Francisco: A new Internet worm has surfaced that criticises British Prime Minister Tony Blair and launches an attack attempting to knock a UK government website off the Internet, anti-virus software provider Sophos Plc said on Thursday. The worm, dubbed ‘‘Quaters’’, spreads via e-mail using a variety of subject lines, such as ‘‘your account information,’’ and spreads in Internet chat relay systems posing as an attempt to break an Internet chain mail world record.

It overwrites files on a user’s computer and displays a message that accuses Blair of wasting taxpayer money on immigrants instead of spending it on the national health service and schools.

‘‘Think about it Mr Blair. Your career depends on it, we’ve had enough,’’ the message says in part. Quaters also tries to launch a denial-of-service attack on the website of the prime minister’s office, http://www.number-10.gov.uk, British-based Sophos said. There have been few reports of the worm circulating on the Internet.

The malicious program is not the first to target a British Prime Minister. In the 1990s, the Fu Manchu virus replaced the name of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with an expletive whenever it was typed, said Chris Belthoff, a senior security analyst at Sophos. (Reuters)