Cypriot ambassador to Russia, George Kasoulides, said Monday that the weapons will be transferred from those ships onto a US vessel and destroyed at sea.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in November finalized a roadmap for destroying Syria’s arsenal more than 1,000 metric tons of weapons-grade chemicals. According to the roadmap, the most dangerous weapons have to be removed from Syria by the end of December and destroyed at sea by April. The rest is slated for destruction by mid-2014.
The disarmament process was launched after an August 21 chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb that killed hundreds of civilians. The US and Western allies accused the Syrian government of responsibility for that attack, but Damascus blamed rebel groups fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad.
Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin said Friday that the United States had identified a country prepared to provide a port for transshipment of Syrian chemical weapons onto an US vessel but provided no specific details.
http://en.ria.ru/world/20131216/185618272/Vessels-for-Syrian-Chemical-Arms-Removal-Dock-in-Cyprus.html
16/12/13
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Nordic ships on call for Syria chemical shipment...
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήAs Danish and Norwegian naval vessels ready to head for Syrian waters on Friday to escort a delayed shipment of chemical weapons for destruction, a U.S. ship has also been prepared to sail within two weeks to take aboard and neutralize the toxic arms.
A year-end deadline was reached through a U.N. Security Council-backed deal brokered by Russia and the United States.
The breakthrough deal set the deadline to remove Syria’s key chemical weapons while it aims to fully dismantle the stock by the middle of 2014.
Norwegian armed forces spokesman Lars Hovtun said the Nordic vessels will weigh anchor from the nearby island of Cyprus, where they headed to port on Monday when it became clear that a year-end deadline for the shipment would be missed.
“We don’t know but what we know is that we are ready for the task and, if called upon, we are ready to be at short notice,” Agence France-Presse quoted Danish task group commander, Commodore Torben Mikkelsen, as saying in a video interview released by the spokesman.
Mikkelsen said that no new date had been set for the shipment but that the vessels would hold their position outside Syrian territorial waters awaiting orders.
When the operation gets underway, the ships are to be joined by Chinese and Russian vessels inside Syrian waters under a plan agreed in Moscow on Friday.
Syria’s worsening civil war, logistical problems and bad weather had held up the operation to move chemical agents to the port of Latakia, said the joint U.N.-Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons mission overseeing the operation.
Under the plan, the chemicals will be taken from Latakia to a port in Italy where they will be transhipped to a U.S. Navy vessel specially fitted with equipment to destroy them at sea.
U.S. ship being readied
To destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, a 197.5-meter U.S. cargo ship with a labyrinth of tubes and valves in its hold should sail within two weeks, officials said Thursday.
MV Cape Ray was opened for media tours by the Defense Department to display the two massive treatment units that will neutralize 700 tons of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and a form of sarin nerve gas. Called field deployable hydrolysis systems, the technology has never been tested under conditions at sea...............http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/01/03/Nordic-ships-ready-for-Syria-chemical-shipment.html
3/1/14