LONDON, Aug. 5 (Xinhuanet) -- An American official leading the search for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has confirmed that he refused to include information from Britain's MI6 in the final report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the Guardian newspaper reported Thursday.

    Charles Duelfer, head of the ISG, said that John Scarlett, the new head of MI6, has sent him an e-mail of information on Iraq's WMD, which Duelfer described as a reminder of investigations carried out by the ISG before January this year, the report said.

    According to the paper, Duelfer did not view the note as inappropriate, but decided not to include any of its contents.

    "What they provided was not new information but elements of a previous report, which I decided were not relevant," Duelfer was quoted as saying.

    Duelfer has been accused of omitting more than 200 pages of inspectors' reports when he delivered a progress report to the US Congress in March under US and British government pressure.

    He is expected to deliver a comprehensive report on the search for Iraq's banned weapons by the end of September, roughly a monthbefore the US presidential election.

    The British Mail on Sunday newspaper claimed that Scarlett had tried to insert untruths into the ISG report in an e-mail to Duelfer on March 8, suggesting that he include "golden nuggets" such as the claim that Iraq had or was developing smallpox weaponsand Saddam Hussein's regime had mobile biological weapons laboratories and was working on a high-velocity rail gun for use in nuclear weapons research.

    The ISG has found no evidence of any of those programs, nor of Iraq's WMD stockpiles used by the United States and Britain to justify the Iraq war. Enditem