The United States has named a new inspector for the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction after its veteran investigator expressed scepticism that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed the arms.

CIA Director George Tenet has named Charles Duelfer to succeed David Kay to lead the search for WMD in Iraq.

Kay resigned from his position saying there was no evidence to prove that Iraq had any large stockpiles of chemical or
biological weapons after the 1991 war.

"I don't think they (WMD) existed," Kay told a reporter. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production programme in the nineties," he said.

The CIA announced that Duelfer, who has previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found, would succeed Kay as Washington's chief arms hunter for the coalition.

Kay said he left the post due to a "complex set of issues. It related in part to a reduction in the resource and a change in focus of the Iraq Survey Group," which is in charge of the weapons hunt.

ISG analysts have been diverted from hunting for weapons of mass destruction to helping in the fight against the insurgency, Kay said.

"When I had started out I had made it a condition that ISG be exclusively focused on WMD, that's no longer so," he
said.