The US will destroy the most dangerous of Syria's chemical weapon stockpile on a ship at sea, the world's chemical watchdog says.
"The neutralisation operations will be conducted on a US vessel at sea using hydrolysis," the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement on Saturday.
"Currently a suitable naval vessel is undergoing modifications to support the operations and to accommodate verification activities by the OPCW," The Hague-based watchdog added.
The ship operation will destroy what is known as "priority chemical weapons", the most dangerous of Syria's total arsenal and ones that have to be out of the country by December 31 under an international deal agreed to avert military strikes on Damascus.
OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan on Saturday declined to name the navy vessel to be used.
OPCW member states have been thrashing out the details of how to destroy Damascus's arsenal ahead of the watchdog's annual meeting set to start on Monday.
A final plan for the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons - on land or at sea - is due to be approved by December 17.
Sigrid Kaag, the top UN official from the joint UN-OPCW mission, confirmed the use of a US ship to render Syria's most dangerous chemical weapons unusable through a dilution process known as hydrolysis, and said the resulting byproducts would be destroyed by commercial companies.
"The chemical effluents, what is left when destroyed, will be treated in countries through a number of companies," she told reporters in Damascus.
The US vessel "will not be in Syrian territorial waters", she added.
The OPCW earlier this month adopted a final roadmap for ridding Syria of its arsenal of more than 1000 tonnes of dangerous chemicals by mid-2014.
According to this roadmap, the "priority" weapons have to be removed from Syria by December 31 and destroyed by April 2014 and the rest by mid-2014.
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