British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a significant change of stance, said on Tuesday that he now accepted that weapons of mass destruction might never be found in Iraq.
"I have to accept that we haven't found them, that we may not find them," Blair said during a question-and-answer exchange with senior members of the British parliament.
"We don't know what has happened to them," Blair added. "They could have been removed. They could have been hidden. They could have been destroyed."
He defended last year's invasion of Iraq, however, saying it was justified after many years of UN Security Council resolutions condemning Saddam Hussein's pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear arms.
"I do not believe there was not a threat in relation to weapons of mass destruction... We have found very clear evidence of intent and desire," he said.
"I genuinely believe that those weapons were there and that is why the international community came together as they did... Whether they were hidden, removed or destroyed, (Saddam) was in clear breach of UN resolutions."
Prior to Tuesday, when he was meeting the chairmen of the various select committees of the House of Commons, Blair had never gone so far as to say Saddam's presumed arsenal might never be found.
Instead, he routinely told people to wait for the findings of the Iraq Survey Group, which has been hunting for weapons of mass destruction since the US and British invasion of Iraq in March last year.