A Danish ship carrying some of Syria's most dangerous chemical agents began transferring them on Wednesday (July 2) onto an American cargo vessel equipped with special gear to neutralize them at sea, amid protests by local residents over safety.
The pier-side handover in southern Italy came after a series of delays in the internationally-backed plan to destroy the Damascus government's stock of toxic arms.
Denmark's Ark Future, which had brought the agents from Syria, started offloading the first containers in the port of Gioia Tauro, police and officials from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said.
They were taken to the converted U.S. container ship Cape Ray which will sail them into the middle of the Mediterranean over the next few days and start transforming them into a much less poisonous soup of chemicals, ready for disposal back on land, the officials said.
Experts have said the process could take between 60 to 90 days, depending on the weather.
But local residents staging a protest said they were furious that the operation was being carried out near their homes.
"They have been killing us for years with tumors and, now, the latest insult was the arrival of this ship full of poison this morning at sunrise. It's shameful. We had asked politicians to be here with us so that if we have to die we'll all die together. But we have seen no politicians,'' said one protester, who led a group of about 50 people.
The Damascus government, fighting rebels for more than three years, agreed to hand over its stockpile, which includes precursors for deadly nerve agent sarin gas, under a deal backed by Washington and Moscow in September.
The agreement averted U.S. military strikes after hundreds of people were killed in a sarin gas attack in the outskirts of Syria's capital, Damascus.
Last month, Syria handed over the remaining eight percent of the 1,300 tonnes it declared to the OPCW, which is monitoring the process.
The Syrian government had said fighting delayed the transfer of the last parts of its stockpile. The Cape Ray had been docked in southern Spain for weeks.
REUTERS