DELUDED war criminal Tony Blair continued yesterday with his non-mea culpa over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite the Chilcot Inquiry’s damning findings.

The inquiry — which published its long-awaited verdict on Wednesday — found that the invasion was unnecessary, unjustified, based on flawed intelligence and that the legal justification put forward by the British government was highly dubious.

The former prime minister came in for particularly strong criticism in the report, with the inquiry finding that he had deliberately exaggerated the risk posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

It also found that he opted to join the invasion before all peaceful options had been exhausted and that Mr Blair had ignored warnings over what would occur in the aftermath of the invasion.

Speaking yesterday, Blair expressed “regret” that he did not challenge intelligence about Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction but insisted he still believed he was right to overthrow the Iraqi dictator and that the world was a better place as a result.

“I can regret the mistakes and I can regret many things about it but I genuinely believe, not just that we acted out of good motives, and I did what I did out of good faith, but I sincerely believe that we would be in a worse position if we hadn’t acted that way. I may be completely wrong about that,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

The former prime minister, who ignored the will of millions of British people to wage the disastrous war, then made the jaw-dropping claim that: “I understand that people still disagree but at least do me the respect — as I respect your position — of reading my argument.”

He went on to suggest that despite the “terrible consequences” of the invasion — which, as he had been warned, saw Iraq plunged into a bloody sectarian civil war — the British-US military intervention had not been in vain.

Shadow Commons leader Paul Flynn, a vocal opponent of the war, said that widespread calls for Mr Blair’s prosecution for war crimes in the wake of the inquiry’s findings should be given “serious consideration.”

While Labour frontbencher Diane Abbott said that Mr Blair’s reputation had “bled to death in the sands of Iraq.”