[I thought Blix was discouraging the US particularly from helping at all.]

By FT staffPublished: December 20 2002 9:40 | Last Updated: December 20 2002 9:40 Hans Blix

Hans Blix on Friday said the US and UK were not giving his team enough information in their hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, while Tony Blair said Saddam Hussein had been playing 'hide and seek' with the inspectors.

The United Nations' chief arms inspector said the two leaders of the war against terrorism had not passed on intelligence and that there had been "not very much" co-operation.

"If the UK and the US are convinced and they say they have evidence, then one would expect that they would be able to tell us where this stuff is," Mr Blix told the BBC Radio 4.

"The most important thing that governments like the UK or the US could give us would be to tell us sites where they are convinced that they keep some weapons of mass destruction. This is what we want to have."

The two western powers were giving briefings about what weapons the Iraqis were believed to have, but not where they were stored.

"They have all the methods to listen to telephone conversations, they have spies, they have satellites so they have a lot of sources which we do not have. We get some but we don't get all the support we need."

Meanwhile Mr Blair, the UK prime minister, said the members of the UN security council, including the US and the UK, not the inspectors would decide on the seriousness of Mr Hussein's breaches of the UN resolution.

The Iraqi leader had a duty to be "open and transparent" about any weapons he had, and Washington and London had "no doubt" that he does have weapons of mass destruction, Mr Blair told The Guardian in an interview published on Friday.

Mr Hussein had so far treated the inspections as "a bit of a game of hide and seek".

"He tries to hide (weapons) and if they find it they win, and if he conceals it, he wins. It is not supposed to be like that. The original concept of the inspection regime was that [the team] would go in, he would then say 'Look, this is what I have got' and they would go on inspecting that it was properly closed down," Mr Blair said.

"That is their job, inspectors are actually people who aren't detectors, they are actually people who are experts in rendering harmless or destroying these weapons of mass destruction material ... His duty is to be open and transparent about what he has. Now he has made his declaration, if the declaration turns out to be false then he is in breach."

On Thursday the US declared Iraq in "material breach" of the UN resolution - a finding that could point the way to war. Condemnation of Saddam Hussein's failure to co-operate with the international community is likely to lead to a month of intensified UN inspections followed by a possible invasion in the spring.

Colin Powell, US secretary of state, said the Iraqi weapons declaration "totally fails" to meet the UN's demand for an accurate and complete account of its weapons programmes.

Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary, said: "The choice now as to whether this issue is resolved peacefully or the international community is forced to solve it by military action is a choice before Saddam Hussein."

-- Anonymous, December 20, 2002