Janice Kelly is expected to give evidence via video link to avoid an unseemly media circus at the London court where the inquiry headed by Lord Brian Hutton will be going into its fourth and final week.

Kelly, 59, a former UN arms inspector in Iraq, was at the center of allegations that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

His death in July, just days after he faced aggressive grilling before a parliamentary committee, hurled Blair -- who testified Thursday -- into the worst political crisis of his six years in power.

The affair claimed its first major casualty Friday when Alastair Campbell, who denies having "sexed up" a September 2002 on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, resigned as Blair's powerful communications strategist.

Kelly, a mild-mannered Ministry of Defence expert on Iraq's deadly arsenal, has been portrayed in some quarters as the innocent victim of a nasty row between Downing Street and the BBC over Iraq.

He was the source of a BBC radio report in late May alleging that the September dossier's key claim -- that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in just 45 minutes -- was inserted by Blair's team despite reservations among intelligence chiefs that it came from a single Iraqi source.

On Sunday, the Observer newspaper cast Kelly in a new light, publishing what it called an unpublished article he wrote anonymously for a report on Iraq before the US-led war on Iraq began in March.

In it he says that, while Iraq's arsenal was "modest", its development under Saddam -- and the fear that terrorists could get their hands on it -- was serious enough to warrant "regime change".

"Although the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest, both in terms of conventional and unconventional weapons, it has never given up its intent to develop and stockpile such weapons for both military and terrorist use," Kelly wrote.

He added: "Perhaps the real threat from Iraq today comes from covert use of such weapons against troops or by terrorists against civilian targets worldwide..."

"The long-term threat, however, remains Iraq's development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction -- something that only regime change will avert."

Documents released by the inquiry over the weekend revealed that Britain's internal security service MI5 carried out a secret analysis of BBC reports on the government's September dossier to find out who its source was.

MI5 reported back on July 1: "The source appears to be an expert on current and recent past Iraq weapons capability, sufficiently well informed to give a statistical figure on the capability."

By that stage, Kelly had come forward to confirm to his superiors that he had met Andrew Gilligan, a BBC radio defence correspondent, a few days before Gilligan first aired the "sexed up" allegations on May 29.

Besides Kelly's widow, the inquiry will hear this week from his daughter, his sister, several of his friends, and police who searched for, then found his body July 18 with a slit wrist in woodland near his Oxfordshire home.

Once the last witness is heard Thursday, Hutton is expected to adjourn hearings until September 15 when some witnesses will be recalled. Observers expect his final report will not be out before the end of October.