A British Broadcasting Corp. reporter acknowledged Wednesday that he made several errors in a report that accused the government of "sexing up" an intelligence dossier on Iraq and set off a fierce dispute with the government.

BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan apologized to a judicial inquiry for indirectly identifying his source, biological weapons expert David Kelly, to a member of Parliament. Kelly apparently killed himself shortly after being publicly identified as the official quoted in the report.

Gilligan also said he was wrong to attribute particular phrases in the report to his then-unidentified single source. He acknowledged that he should have run the story by Prime Minister Tony Blair's office before broadcast.

In his May 29 broadcast, Gilligan said that one of the officials in charge of drawing up the dossier on Iraqi weapons alleged that Blair's office inserted a claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes' notice, when it knew the information was wrong.

Gilligan, speaking to the inquiry into Kelly's death, said Wednesday that he had made a slip of the tongue during a live broadcast when he said, referring to the 45-minute claim, that the government "probably knew it was wrong."

Kelly had suggested that some people in the intelligence services did not want the claim included but had never actually made it clear that the government was informed of their disagreement, Gilligan said.

"My intention was to report what Dr. Kelly had told me and I regret ... that I didn't report entirely carefully and accurately what he said," Gilligan said. "My error was to ascribe that statement to him when it was actually a conclusion of mine."

The dossier was a key element in winning public support for the war in Iraq and the report set off an intense fight between the BBC and Blair's government, which vehemently denied overruling intelligence advice in its drafting.

Richard Sambrook, BBC's director of news, told the inquiry there were "a number of lessons that the BBC will have to take from this."

Sambrook said the report should have been scripted to avoid the pitfalls of a live report and acknowledged he should have looked over Gilligan's notes much earlier in the controversy to check that his report was correct.

Sambrook criticized Gilligan's phrasing and his failure to make notes of a call to the Ministry of Defense during which the reporter said he told officials about the story.

A Defense Ministry press officer previously told the inquiry that Gilligan made no mention of the story during the telephone call, and instead asked about another report.

Gilligan disputed that version but acknowledged he should also have contacted Blair's office at No. 10 Downing St. about the story.

"My view is that Andrew Gilligan is extremely good at finding out information but there are sometimes questions of nuances and subtlety in how he presents it which are not all that they should be," Sambrook said. "I described him as a reporter who paints in primary colors rather than something more subtle."

As the hunt for the source of Gilligan's story intensified in the days after its broadcast, Gilligan stood firm in protecting Kelly's identity.

He refused reveal his source to a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, but he did send a note to a committee member saying Kelly was the source of a report by a BBC colleague, and suggested questions the member could put to Kelly when he testified on July 15.

"It was quite wrong to send it (the message) and I can only apologize," Gilligan said.

Gilligan told the inquiry, headed by senior judge Lord Hutton, that his report accurately reflected Kelly's assessment that some people in the intelligence services were unhappy about the inclusion of the 45-minute claim because they believed it had not been sufficiently corroborated.

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