Blix Doesn’t Expect Capture to Yield Banned Weapons

Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Tuesday that it was becoming “increasingly clear” that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destruction.

Blix, who announced the members of a new Stockholm-based independent commission on banned weapons, said he didn’t think Hussein’s capture would result in the discovery of any such weapons in Iraq.

“My guess is that there are no weapons of mass destruction left,” said Blix, who headed the team of U.N. inspectors that searched Iraq for more than three months before the war without making any significant discovery of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs.

Blix said he believed that most of Iraq’s banned weapons were destroyed in 1991.

When his inspection teams found a crate of warheads in January, he said, they asked themselves “whether this was the tip of an iceberg, or was it just an ice floe floating around” as a remnant.

“I think it’s getting safer and safer to say that it was just an ice floe,” Blix said.

The international commission was established this year in Stockholm and aims to provide a new impetus for international efforts to curtail -- or stop -- the use of banned weapons.

Blix, who heads the panel, retired from the United Nations in June.