"(Hoon) is going to be hung out to dry in the hope that his resignation will get Tony Blair off the hook," a government source said

LONDON, Aug 10 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon is expected to be the scapegoat for the death of  David Kelly, the government’s top weapons expert at the center of an uproar over British intelligence on Iraq, a British newspaper reported Sunday, August 10.

"Hoon will be the fall guy for the whole government," The Sunday Express quoted a government source as saying.

"He is going to be hung out to dry in the hope that his resignation will get (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair off the hook," he added.

The British paper quoted the source as arguing that "Hoon is expendable but Tony Blair is not," reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The British government source expected Hoon to resign once a judicial inquiry into Kelly's death is concluded.

He underlined, however, that "nobody believes Hoon was the one behind the leaking of Dr Kelly's name, that would never have been done without Downing Street's say-so."

Caught in the lethal crossfire over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) between Downing Street and the BBC which dictated the course of his death, Kelly's body was found Thursday, July 17, at Harrowdown Hill, five miles from his home in Southmoor, Oxfordshire.

The source said that the Ministry of Defense (MoD) would be held responsible for the "outing" of Kelly as the source of the BBC report that Blair government "sexed up" a dossier on Iraq ahead of the U.S.-led war in March.

"Deliberate Outing"

Meanwhile, the MoD's most senior civil servant is said to have told the BBC that his department had deliberately "outed" Kelly.

Blair government has been accused of tarnishing the image of Kelly after a top government official described the late scientist as "Walter Mitty" in an off-the-record interview with a British paper.

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 hero.

According to a report in The Sunday Telegraph, the MoD’s permanent secretary Sir Kevin Tebbit, also allegedly branded Kelly as an "eccentric" shortly before he died.

Both revelations may be used by the BBC in evidence to the inquiry, the paper said.

The mild-mannered 59-year-old senior U.N. advisor admitted he had met Andrew Gilligan, the defense correspondent of BBC Radio 4's Today program, a week before he broadcast his story on the Radio about the so-called "dodgy Iraq dossier."

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

Gilligan is expected to be among the first witnesses to give evidence to the inquiry's presiding judge Lord Brian Hutton.

Hoon and Blair, both currently abroad on summer vacation, are also due to testify before Hutton in the inquiry expected to last at least two months.

Kelly was laid to rest in silence Wednesday, August 6, with Blair and Hoon making the conspicuous absence during his funeral.