Israeli air strike hits Russian missile shipment in Syrian port of Latakia

Israeli warplanes attacked a shipment of Russian missiles inside a Syrian government stronghold, officials said, a development that threatened to add another volatile layer to regional tensions from the Syrian conflict.

The revelation came on Thursday as the government of President Bashar al-Assad met a key deadline in an ambitious plan to eliminate Syria's entire chemical weapons stockpile by mid-2014 and avoid international military action. The announcement by a global chemical weapons watchdog that the country has completed the destruction of equipment used to produce the deadly agents highlights Assad's willingness to co-operate, and puts more pressure on the divided and outgunned rebels to attend a planned peace conference.

But it emerged that Syria's Foreign Minister Walid Muallem has asked international inspectors to spare a dozen of its chemical weapons factories from the wrecking ball. The Syrians say they want to convert the plants into civilian chemical facilities. The move is fuelling concern among some non-proliferation experts that Damascus may be seeking to maintain the industrial capacity to reconstitute its chemical weapons programme at some later date.

The Syrian request - which was contained in a confidential letter from Muallem to Ahmet Uzumcu, the director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) - has also raised concern among some Western governments that Syria may seek to entangle the inspection agency in lengthy negotiations that could drag out the process of destroying Syria's chemical weapons.

Meanwhile Russia said yesterday that most of Syria's chemical weapons may be taken out of the country for destruction because of the violence raging between rebels and the government.

"Much speaks in favour of the idea of moving the predominant majority of the toxic agents that exist in Syria out of this country," the RIA Novosti news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying.