WASHINGTON, May 17 (Xinhuanet) -- US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that intelligence provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq before the war was wrong.

    "In the case of the mobile trucks and trains, there was multiple sourcing for that," Powell said in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" program recorded Sunday in Jordan and aired in the US several hours later. "Unfortunately, that multiple sourcingover time has turned out to be not accurate."

    Powell said his February 2003 speech to the United Nations -- during which he showed what he called sound evidence of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction -- was based on "the best information" provided to him by the CIA.

    "At the time that I made the presentation, it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community. But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading," he said.

    "And for that I am disappointed and I regret it," Powell said, disclosing that the information about the mobile biological weapons labs came from an Iraqi defector and "other sources" corroborated it.

    No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the beginning of the war. President George W. Bush, who used the claimed existence of such weapons as justification to launch the war, has appointed an independent panel to look into the intelligence failure.

    Powell acknowledged April 2 that the information he used in hisUN presentation was not solid but stopped short of drawing clear conclusions. Enditem