Albania to destroy chemical arms by 2007

TIRANA - Albania will destroy a decades-old stockpile of chemical weapons within two years, using $18.3 million ($26.5 million) of funding pledged by the United States, Defence Minister Pandeli Majko said on Tuesday.

Albania declared the 16 tonnes of Chinese-made chemical agents in 2003 and officials told Reuters they had been discussing with Washington since then how best to prevent them falling into the wrong hands, and finally to destroy them.

Albania is expected to take possession of a specially-built incinerator next year to begin destroying the stockpile.

The chemicals were bought from China in the 1970s by the regime of former communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Claesen D Wyckoff, head of the US State Department's Defence Threat Reduction Agency, said he would visit the site near the capital Tirana where the chemicals, identified as mustard gas, lewisite and adamsite, are stored.

Under Hoxha's rule, Albania prepared formidable defences.

US officials have been quoted as saying the warfare chemicals had been kept with little or no protection for more than a decade.

But the Albanian authorities, who have so far allowed only a Washington Post reporter to visit the site, insist the agents were guarded "as well as the state treasury".

Now a US ally, Albania is slowly recovering from the post-communist chaos which in 1997 saw mobs enraged by a pyramid scheme rip-off loot an estimated 800,000 guns from army stocks.

Earlier in the 1990s, several Islamic fundamentalist groups set up bases in the country, which like neighbouring Balkan states has highly porous borders.

- REUTERS