Poll finds 52 percent of Britons believe Blair deliberately misled them to invade Iraq in 2003.

Nearly one quarter of Britons want former prime minister Tony Blair to be tried as a war criminal over the Iraq war, according to a poll published on Sunday.

A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times newspaper found that 23 percent of those surveyed think that Blair should face war crimes charges.

The weekly newspaper added that 52 percent believe that Blair deliberately misled the country in the run-up to the 2003 war.

Blair, who led the nation into the controversial conflict, will meanwhile give evidence to Britain’s public inquiry into the Iraq war at some point in the two-week period from January 25.

The survey suggested that most people think the former premier knew that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

Yougov found that only 32 percent of those polled accepted that Blair “genuinely believed” in the threat that he used to help make the case for the Iraq war.

And 49% to 31% also said they believed Blair’s former communications director Alastair Campbell was not truthful when he gave evidence to Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry this week.

YouGov interviewed 2,033 voters in an online poll that was conducted on Thursday and Friday.

The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is viewed by critics as an ‘act of aggression’ that violated international law.

Subsequent US occupation policies caused the country to descend into almost total chaos, bordering on civil war.

An estimated 1.3 million Iraqis have been killed in Iraq as a direct result of the invasion, while millions more have fled the country.