British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday that Britain is facing an unprecedented level of threat from global terrorism.

"The threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before," said Blair.

"It is to the world's security what globalization is to the world's economy," he said in his Sedgefield constituency, northeastern England.

The prime minister has been seeking to re-focus on domestic issues, but he has been dogged by allegations about the legitimacy of going to war with Iraq and claims that British intelligence had spied on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Rebutting the critics on the legality of his decision to go to war in Iraq, Blair said no other decision he had taken "had been so divisive," asserting his "fervent view" that the danger posed by the Iraqi regime had been "real and existential."

"The true danger was not to any politician's reputation, but to our country," said Blair.

Speaking earlier, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, visiting Pakistan, repeated this belief that international terrorism represented a new scale of threat.

However, Blair's decision to go to war against Iraq faced a further challenge from former chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, who claims that the war was illegal.

"I don't buy the argument the war was legalized by the Iraqi violation of earlier (UN) resolutions," he told the London-based Independent newspaper issued Friday.

However, Blix dismissed calls that either US President George W. Bush or Blair should resign or face a tribunal over the war, saying that they were already paying a political price for their decision.

(Xinhua News Agency March 6, 2004)