British intelligence officials did not intend to mislead anyone by releasing documents in 2002 claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Britain's former spy chief said Tuesday.

John Scarlett, chair of the joint intelligence committee during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and later head of Britain's, Secret Intelligence Service (known as MI6), was testifying before an ongoing inquiry into the U.K.'s role in the invasion.

He told the inquiry he was not pressured into exaggerating information that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that could be deployed in under an hour, according to the Guardian newspaper.

Earlier Tuesday, a British opposition MP released a reporting suggesting British intelligence acquired that particular information from "an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border" and that it was unreliable.

In September 2002, the U.K. government's intelligence committee contributed reports to a document entitled Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, which then Prime Minister Tony Blair used to bolster support for an invasion of Iraq.

The document suggested that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, had developed chemical and biological weapons and was in the process of building a nuclear bomb. In the dossier's foreword, Blair alleged Saddam Hussein was "continuing to develop WMD" and that Hussein's "military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

After the dossier was published on Sept. 24, 2002, several British newspapers included the claim in their stories. London's Evening Standard headline read: "45 minutes from attack" while the Sun carried the headline: "Brits 45 mins from doom."

Britain joined the invasion of Iraq six months later.

Scarlett told the inquiry that WMD in this document did not refer to ballistic missiles and that the matter "would not have been lost in translation" if they had used the term "munitions" rather than "weapons."

"There was absolutely no conscious intention to manipulate the language, or to obfuscate, or to create a misunderstanding as to what they might refer to," Scarlett said.

The document had been written up using unnamed and unspecified intelligence about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. Scarlett said the information at the time was "reliable and authoritative."

"In the view of the committee, that intelligence was sufficiently authoritative to firm up whether or not Iraq did currently possess chemical and biological agents," he said.

MP says claim "demonstrably untrue"

Earlier in the day, British opposition MP Adam Holloway said the claim Iraq had WMD that could be deployed in 45 minutes came from a taxi cab driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border.

Holloway, a member of the U.K. parliament's defence committee, said British intelligence received the information from a taxi driver who remembered two Iraqi military commanders discussing Hussein's weapons two years earlier.

In a report released Tuesday, Holloway said intelligence officers were unsure about the reliability of the information but put aside their reservations after the government pushed for the document's publication.

"Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, British intelligence was squeezing their agents in Iraq for information," Holloway said.

Hollyway stated an intelligence analyst had flagged the claim in a footnote as "demonstrably untrue."

John Chilcot, the chairman of the Iraq inquiry, said Holloway's allegations could have relevance to the investigation but that he would not ask Scarlett about them during Tuesday's testimony.

The inquiry, which is in its third week, is expected to publish its findings late next year.