"I think some in the media have chosen to use the word `imminent.' Those were not words we used. We used `grave and gathering' threat," he insisted.
But the alleged WMDs are not in Syria, as Kay also suggested, said top Syrian officials.
"Accusations leveled at Syria [in respect to Iraqi WMDs] are unfounded," Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Naji Otri told Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite TV.
Otri also said there was also no basis to charges that foreign fighters were crossing from Syria into Iraq to attack coalition forces.
"We have absolutely nothing to do with what is going on in Iraq now in terms of operations in response to the occupation of Iraq," he said.
Syrian Information Minister Ahmad al-Hassan on Sunday blasted Kay's allegations as "baseless deception and lies."
The aim "is to cover up their failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, the pretext they advanced for going to war," Hassan said.
In London, a judicial inquiry into the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly has cleared British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his government of "dishonorable conduct" or embellishing its September, 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, the Sun newspaper reported yesterday.
The tabloid said it had seen extracts of the conclusions of the report which Lord Brian Hutton was to make public at 12:30pm yesterday. Blair was to make a statement in parliament 90 minutes later.
Kelly, a respected Ministry of Defence expert on biological weapons, killed himself last July a few days after he was exposed as the source of a BBC radio report in May which alleged that Blair's government had "sexed up" a September, 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
His suicide hurled Blair into the worst crisis since taking office in 1997.
RSS