LONGWORTH, England, August 7 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - David Kelly, the weapons expert at the center of an uproar over the way Britain was led into the Iraq invasion, was laid to rest in silence Wednesday, August 6, 19 days after he was found dead with a slit wrist, leaving many controversial questions unanswered.

In accordance with his family's wishes, a private funeral for the one-time U.N. arms inspector took place at Saint Mary's Church in Longworth, Oxfordshire, near to his rural home and the woods where his body was found.

His widow and their three daughters were among the 160 people at the Anglican funeral. Attending for the government was Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and Lord Brian Hutton, the judge conducting an inquiry into Kelly's death, was also present, with Prime Minister making the conspicuous absence.

Blair is on vacation in Barbados this week. Also out of the country is Geoff Hoon, the defense secretary, another key figure in the affair.

A lone bell tolled as Kelly's coffin, decked with a white wreath, was taken into the church, past some 40 other wreaths lining the path. In the churchyard, a British flag flew at half staff.

On 29 May, Gilligan broadcast that a senior British official had told him that the Government's dossier on Iraq, published in September 2002, was "sexed up" by Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications chief, against the wishes of the intelligence services.

The funeral came a day after Tom Kelly, one of Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesmen, apologized for referring to Kelly as a fictional daydreamer "Walter Mitty" during an off-the-record talk with a London newspaper.

Despite vigorous denials to the contrary, the gaff left the impression that Downing Street was out to blacken Kelly's name as the judicial inquiry into his apparent suicide gets underway.

Prescott, who is running the government in Blair's absence, wrote Tuesday to Kelly's widow apologizing for spokesman Kelly's remark.

One of Kelly's friends, television journalist Tom Mangold, recoiled earlier Wednesday at the "Walter Mitty" remark, which is generally interpreted as a metaphor for someone with delusions of grandeur.

"David was the opposite of Walter Mitty," Mangold said on BBC radio, who is making a film on Kelly.

"If you watch him in action in this footage you see a man wearing Clarks shoes, National Health Service spectacles, fairly modest clothes. He did not take himself seriously in that respect... He was the exact opposite of Walter Mitty."

In the original 1941 short story by U.S. writer and cartoonist James Thurber, Walter Mitty was a shy, henpecked husband who endures his humdrum existence by imagining himself as a heroic pilot, surgeon and soldier.