Libya has asked the global chemical weapons watchdog to draw up plans to ship a stockpile of 850 tons of chemicals overseas due to deteriorating security, sources have told Reuters.
Diplomats and officials said that transporting the toxins abroad for destruction, as was recently done in Syria, is the most viable option to keep them out of the hands of battling militant groups.
Since the removal of Muammar Gaddafi three years ago, the country has descended into anarchy, with rival militias and hardline Islamic groups battling for political control and vast oil reserves.
Facilities to destroy the chemical weapons were set up and Libyans were trained to use the equipment, but fighting threatens stability and has made it impossible to safely conduct their work.
Experts at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which won the Nobel Peace prize this year, are “working on something right now,” one source told Reuters.
The technical details still need to be worked out and the OPCW yesterday declined to comment.
The OPCW said Tripoli has already destroyed weapons that were ready for use including armed munitions and the most deadly, or “category 1”, toxins with the help of Western countries, but still has around 850 tons of industrial chemicals that could be used to produce weapons.
An armed group from the western city of Misurata seized Tripoli in August, forcing the elected parliament and senior officials to move to the east.
This week, soldiers and police clashed near Libya’s biggest El Sharara oilfield in the south, while separate fighting erupted in the west not far from the Zawiya refinery.
The Misurata-group has set up its own government, which is not recognised by the international community backing the largely powerless Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni.
Late on Monday the country’s elected parliament approved a new cabinet proposed by Thinni, parliamentary spokesman Faraj Hashem said.
The House of Representatives agreed on a second 13-minister cabinet list after rejecting last week an initial 16-member lineup as too large, he said.
“The Libyan government has said the security situation is untenable and to guarantee the safety of the remaining stock-pile they have asked the OPCW to look at this,” one diplomatic source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
The government said the security situation is untenable and has asked watchdog to look at stockpile
Since joining the OPCW in 2004, Libya has declared 26 metric tons of sulphur mustard, 1,390 tonnes of raw, precursor chemicals, 3,563 unloaded aerial bombs and three former chemical weapons pro-duction facilities.
Some of those have already been destroyed and OPCW head Ahmet Uzumcu said in February he was confident the remaining chemicals would be destroyed next year, but given the worsening situation, Libya is likely to miss a planned completion date of December 2016.
The industrial chemicals could be shipped from the remote storage site, Ruwagha, in southeastern Libya, where they were initially supposed to be destroyed.
Under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, all declared chemical weapons must be destroyed in the country of origin. The OPCW, based in the Hague, Netherlands, was set up to enforce this. Its founding treaty has been ratified by all countries but Israel, Egypt, Myanmar, South Sudan, Angola and North Korea.