Two Scandinavian escort ships waiting to remove Syria’s chemical weapons have returned to Cyprus empty handed.<br /><br />Damascus had agreed to hand over some of its most deadly toxins from the Syrian port of Latakia on December 31, but failed to show.<br /><br />Officials from the ‘Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ had expected the deadline to be missed.<br /><br />“We understand that a number of factors have added up which have made the Syrian authorities unable to meet this December 31 deadline – the poor weather in certain parts of Syria is one of these factors and, of course, the volatility of the security situation,” explained OPCW spokesman Christian Chartier.<br /><br />The December date was supposed to have been the first milestone of a deal brokered by the US and Russia to rid Syria of its chemical weapons arsenal by June 2014.<br /><br />In a separate development, an anti-President Bashar al-Assad monitoring group based in Britain estimates that at least 130,000 people have been killed in the conflict since it began in March 2011.
