(AFP) – Jul 1, 2008

PARIS (AFP) — The asbestos-contaminated French aircraft carrier Clemenceau, which has struggled to find a foreign country willing to dismantle it, will be broken up in Britain, officials said Tuesday.

The ship, once a proud symbol of France's naval might, will be broken up by a company called Able UK which is based in the northeast, just outside Middlesbrough, the defence ministry said in a statement.

The Clemenceau is currently docked in the northwestern French port of Brest, where it returned a year ago after an embarrassing saga that saw it travel as far as India in a bid to find a company to dismantle it.

Its return to France was hailed as a major victory by environmentalist groups, who had fought tooth and nail to block its transfer to Alang on India's west coast, home to the world's largest shipbreaking yard.

The decommissioned warship has been searching for a country willing to dismantle its asbestos-insulated hull because of concerns it posed a grave health risk as as an environmental hazard.

Five companies had been in the running for the new contract to break it up, the ministry statement said.

Britain and France must draw up a "cross-border transfer authorisation," a procedure which will take a few weeks and after which the ship will be able to leave Brest, it added.

The French government has said the carrier contains 45 tonnes of asbestos, but according to a firm which helped partially decontaminate it several years ago, the hull has between 500 and 1,000 tonnes of the carcinogenic substance.

The former warship, which is 266 metres (878 feet) long and 51 metres (170 feet) wide, saw action in the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s and the first Gulf war of 1991.

Following its decommissioning in 1997, the ship -- named after World War I prime minister Georges Clemenceau -- was renamed as "Hull Q790."

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