Dr Mahathir Mohamad said today he is skeptical that the Bush administration did not know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

"I don't believe that they didn't know, If they suspected that there were, they should have given Dr Hans Blix (United Nations chief weapons inspector) a chance to carry out a full investigation," the prime minister was quoted by Bernama as saying.

He said US President George W Bush's decision to attack Iraq was hasty and made without sufficient proof and now no weapons of mass destruction were found in that country.

It was sad that the Bush administration, which was responsible for world peace, was prepared to make the drastic decision to attack Iraq, killing so many people in the process, based merely on grounds that were not fully proven, he said.

Mahathir was asked to comment on reports that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had reported that it had not found any signs of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq although there was ample proof to show that Saddam Hussein intended to make chemical and biological weapons.

No stockpiles found

According to a Reuters report yesterday, CIA adviser David Kay said the US-led team hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons, six months after the United States launched a war against Iraq to remove such a threat.

Kay was sent to Iraq this summer to co-ordinate efforts to find those weapons, and he presented a classified interim report to US lawmakers behind closed doors on Thursday.

"We have not found at this point actual weapons. It does not mean we've concluded there are no actual weapons. It means at this point in time, and it's a huge country with a lot to do, that we have not yet found weapons," Kay told reporters in Washington.