British officials are claiming that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein may have been duped into believing that Iraq did possess weapons of mass destruction, a leading London newspaper said.

According to the left-wing Guardian daily, the latest theory doing the round in government circles is a result of an attempt to find what one source called a "logical reason" why no chemical and biological weapons have been found in Iraq.

The theory, according to the same source, says that Saddam and his senior aides were told by lower-ranking Iraqi officers that his forces were equipped with usable chemical and biological weapons.

The officers, according to the theory, did not want to tell their superiors the truth -- that the weapons were either destroyed or no longer usable.

This would explain, British government officials say, why the intelligence gleaned by their secret service agents -- from informants close to Saddam's inner circle -- was also erroneous.

"A delicious irony if true," is how the hypothesis was described by Gary Samore of the London-based thinktank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, quoted by The Guardian.

Samore said he was familiar with the idea being put out by British officials "trying to figure out why Saddam behaved in such an irrational fashion."

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