Britain has agreed to destroy part of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile at a commercial facility and escort Scandinavian ships transporting the toxic cargo, the British government said on Friday.
Roughly 150 tons of industrial chemicals will be transported from Syria by ship to a port in Britain, the Foreign Office said in a statement.
The regime of Bashar al-Assad declared 1,300 tons of chemical weapons to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which won the Nobel peace prize this year.
Under a tight deadline agreed with the United States and Russia, Damascus has until Dec. 31 to relinquish the most toxic chemicals. Its entire chemical weapons program must be dismantled by mid-2014.
The deal may have averted U.S. missile strikes threatened after hundreds of people were killed in the outskirts of Damsacus on Aug. 21, the worst poison gas attack in a quarter century.
No company was named by the Foreign Office, but Veolia Environment VE, a French-based firm with chemical incineration plants in Britain, has been approached by the British government, sources said.