A congressional committee probing the 2012 attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, announced on Friday that it will release its report within weeks. The incident claimed the lives of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

"We're going to get the report out. It'll be in the next month," said Representative Trey Gowdy to broadcaster MSNBC. The Tea Party Republican from South Carolina leads the House committee which has been investigating the attack for two years.

The mostly Republican panel has received criticism for the delay in presenting its findings as well as for politicizing the event to the detriment of Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time.

"I can't stop an investigation because an executive branch agency won't give me documents, and we're still owed documents," Gowdy told MSNBC, adding the report would provide the public "what we're missing," from the federal government and from news reports.

Report before the nominating conventions

This meant that the report will be available before the Republican and Democratic political parties hold their presidential nominating conventions in July, when Clinton is widely expected to clinch the Democratic candidacy.

The Pentagon dismissed Gowdy's criticism that the Department of Defense had been uncooperative in the inquiry. Spokesman Peter Cook told reporters that his department had been "cooperating for some time with this committee in a range of ways," and had offered to make pilots working the day of the attacks available for interview.

es/jm (Reuters, AP)