The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, a news report said Tuesday.

The agency, however, failed to give that information to President George W. Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, The New York Times report quoted government officials as saying.

CIA officials, saying that only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, played down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation.

The existence of a secret prewar CIA operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers have been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the report said.

The Senate panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a wide-ranging report this week on the first phase of its inquiry.

The report is expected to criticize the CIA and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Iraq had illicit weapons.

(Xinhua News Agency July 7, 2004)