London, Sept 10 : Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he tried to convince Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to give up power after the start of the revolt against his regime.

Blair said he had no regrets about setting aside decades of hostility between Britain and Libya and holding out an olive branch in 2004, because in return, Gaddafi agreed to give up his programme of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

"No," he said in an interview with the Reuters news agency to mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. "I always say to people it is absolutely simple - the external policy of Libya changed," The Telegraph reports.

"The trouble was in the end they weren''t prepared to reform internally. They were less of a threat to the outside world, but inside they were a threat to their people and then when the uprising happened, again, there was a big choice. I remember actually speaking to Colonel Gaddafi at the time it happened and saying this is the moment to realise you are going to have to go and be the person that gives it up," Blair added.

Instead, Gaddafi insisted that those wanting him to go were "rats" who had to be hunted down "house by house, alley by alley", and the uprising turned into a civil war.

New details about the close relationship between the Blair government and Libya after MI6 negotiated the scrapping of the WMD programme in 2003, have emerged in Tripoli since the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

A document found in the former British embassy even showed that Blair advised Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the dictator's son, on his PhD thesis at the London School of Economics.

On Thursday, former Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim had claimed that Saif''s relationship with Blair had indirectly fuelled his obsession with succeeding his father. (ANI)