Senior MPs have delivered a severe rebuke to the government over its approval of the sale of a wide range of arms, including sniper rifles, machine guns and "crowd control goods" to countries in the Middle East and north Africa.

Britain supplied the weapons despite official guidelines stating that exports of equipment that could be used for internal repression must be blocked. In a damning report earlier this year, the Commons arms export controls committees demanded an urgent review of exports to "authoritarian regimes worldwide".

They referred specifically to the Mubarak and Gaddafi regimes in Egypt and Libya, to Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Observers said military trucks sent by the Saudis to help suppress demonstrations in Bahrain were British.

In a written statement slipped out earlier this week, the foreign secretary, William Hague, said that in light of the committees' findings, the government had conducted a review. It "concluded that there was no evidence of any misuse of controlled military goods exported from the United Kingdom". Hague added: "Consultations with our overseas posts revealed no evidence that any of the offensive naval, air or land-based military platforms used by governments in north Africa or the Middle East against their own populations during the Arab spring, were supplied from the United Kingdom."

But in a stinging response, Sir John Stanley, a former Conservative defence minister and chairman of the arms controls committees, said he was not surprised by the outcome of the government's review. "Given that there has been, understandably, an almost total absence of official observers in close proximity to the violent internal repression that has been taking place, and given also the fact that the UK government approved arms exports including machine guns, sniper rifles, combat shotguns and ammunition were not emblazoned with union jacks, it is hardly surprising that the [Foreign Office] could safely conclude 'there was no evidence of any misuse of controlled military goods exported from the United Kingdom'," Stanley said.

The fact that the government had now revoked 157 arms export licences to north Africa and the Middle East provided "the clearest evidence of the scale of the misjudgment of the risk that arms approved for export to certain authoritarian countries in north Africa and the Middle East might be used for internal repression, a misjudgment by both the present government and its predecessor", Stanley added.

He has written to Hague, demanding more information about the government's arms exports policy and asking why the government had not revoked arms and arms-related exports to Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as to Libya, Egypt, and Bahrain.

In a report in April, the Commons committees said the government must set out "how it intends to reconcile the potential conflict of interest between increased emphasis on promoting arms exports with the staunch upholding of human rights". The MPs also castigated the government for failing to demonstrate satisfactorily whether, and if so how, it assesses the risk that individual arms exports may be linked to bribery and corruption.