David Kay, a CIA officer in charge of US efforts to hunt weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, said Thursday that no such weapons have been found yet and his team will continue the search.

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons," Kay said in a statement after attending closed-door hearings held by US Congress.

"But we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone," Kay said.

He said what his team has found so far was "dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."

"Despite evidence of (former Iraqi president) Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material," Kay said, referring to UN weapons inspectors' withdrawal from Baghdad in late 1998.

"However, Iraq did take steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program," Kay said.

Complaining of the loss of many evidence and other difficulties, Kay said, "It is far too early to reach any definitive conclusions and in some areas, we may never reach that goal."

Kay, who is also a former UN weapons inspector, had been widely expected to submit an "interim report" about his team's weapons hunting in Iraq. But in a letter to US Congress on Wednesday, CIA Director George Tenet told the lawmakers that the chief US weapons hunter is not ready to make any conclusions about Iraq's alleged weapons programs.

Kay is leading a 1,200-strong team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which the Bush administration had cited as a major pretext to go to war with Iraq.

The search has so far cost about US$300 million and the administration is reportedly seeking additional US$600 million from the Congress.

(Xinhua News Agency October 3, 2003)