MOSCOW, December 16 (RIA Novosti) – Danish and Swedish ships that will be used to ferry away Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal have docked in Cyprus on their way to the civil war-wracked Mideast nation.
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.
