by Paddy McGuffin
and Luke James

BEREAVED families of soldiers killed fighting in Iraq were told yesterday they will have to wait at least another eight months to hear the official verdict on Britain’s role.

Six years after launching his inquiry into the Iraq war, Sir John Chilcot announced he will belatedly publish the final report by next summer.

The 2 million-word document, which has cost £10m to date, will be finished by April and published by “June or July,” he said.

The latest delay was the final insult for many relatives of the 179 military personnel who lost their lives thousands of miles away from home.

Rose Gentle of Military Families Against The War, who son Gordon was killed in a bomb attack in Basra in 2004, branded the news “another let-down.”

“It’s another few months to wait and suffer again,” she said.

And Reg Keys, who’s son Tom was killed in 2003, expressed fears that the final report would be a whitewash.

“All we will get now from the report is a watered-down version of some of the criticisms that Sir John put to these civil servants and senior politicians,” he warned.

Sir John said the latest delay was caused by a need for “national security checks” to ensure human rights obligations and security “will not inadvertently be breached by publication of the inquiry’s report as a whole.”

He also said it will “take some weeks to prepare the report for printing” because of its “considerable size.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a vociferous opponent of the 2003 invasion, said the wait was “getting beyond ridiculous.”

“We need to know what happened. We need to know why it happened. We need to know who made the decisions. And we never need to make these kind of catastrophic mistakes again,” he said.

Mr Corbyn added that he hoped the inquiry was “not still negotiating with Tony Blair” over the report’s contents.

Mr Blair issued a statement insisting that any suggestion he had delayed the report through the Maxwellisation process was “categorically incorrect.”

But Stop the War coalition spokesman Chris Nineham warned the process, along with the report’s vetting by the security services, could leave the report a “long-delayed whitewash.”

He told the Star it was “extraordinary” that Chilcot should have taken so long to try to establish facts that most people already believed had been settled.

“The key issue is that of deliberate fabrication,” he said. “Recently leaked documents show that Tony Blair lied to Parliament and the people to take them into an illegal war of regime change.”

The inquiry, ordered by former Labour PM Gordon Brown, has been beset with delays since its launch on June 15 2009.

They included the Maxwellisation process where those criticised in the report, including former Labour PM Tony Blair, were given advance warning so as to prepare their defence.