Iraqi cabbie could have been key source for Blair

London: Gossip from an Iraqi taxi driver was a key source for Tony Blair's ‘dodgy dossier'.

A Conservative MP's report claims the unlikely secret agent was one of MI6's top sources when it was building a case to justify the invasion.

He provided the information that Saddam Hussain could fire chemical weapons at British targets within 45 minutes. The revelation comes as the death toll of British troops in Afghanistan reaches 100 this year alone. Senior intelligence officials told the MP that the cabbie falsely claimed Saddam Hussain had acquired long-range missiles after listening to Iraqi commanders chatting in his taxi.

The revelations come in a report on the Iraq War by Tory MP Adam Holloway, due to be published by the think tank First Defence.

Holloway was told about the cab driver by a former member of one of Britain's intelligence agencies who was serving at the time of the build-up to war.

Intelligence from the cab driver allegedly bolstered the suggestion that weapons of mass destruction could be fired at British targets in Cyprus — a central plank of the dodgy dossier.

Holloway's report says analysts at the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) quickly decided the cab driver's information about missiles was ‘verifiably' false and warned that the agent was not reliable. But a carefully worded footnote in an MI6 report was apparently brushed aside by Downing Street officials when the dodgy dossier was put together in September 2002.

Holloway says a security official in the US with knowledge of the pre-war MI6 reports confirmed to him that "the footnote was ignored".

The claim that the rush to war was based in part on false information from a gossipy taxi driver is perhaps the most embarrassing revelation yet about the desperate lengths to which the Government went to justify the invasion.

Pressure

In his report, The Failure of British Political and Military Leadership in Iraq, Holloway writes: "Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] case, SIS were squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all. One agent did come up with something — the ‘45 minutes', allegedly discussed in a high-level Iraqi political meeting."

The MP said: "SIS were running a senior Iraqi army officer who had a source of his own, a cab driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border. He apparently overheard two Iraqi army officers two years before who had spoken about weapons with the range to hit targets elsewhere in the Middle East."