DAMASCUS: Syria’s entire declared stock of chemical weapons has been placed under seal, a watchdog said Thursday, as peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi wrapped up a Syria visit to muster support for Geneva talks.

“All stocks of chemical weapons and agents have been placed under seals that are impossible to break,” Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons spokesman Christian Chartier told AFP, adding the seals were “tamper proof.”

“These are 1,000 tons of chemical agents (which can be used to make weapons) and 290 tons of chemical weapons,” Chartier said in The Hague.

OPCW and UN inspectors have until mid-2014 to destroy Syria’s entire chemical arsenal and production facilities under the terms of a US-Russian deal to head off military strikes on President Bashar Assad’s regime. “The weapons and agents remain at their respective sites, we’re not yet at the stage of moving them,” Chartier said.

OPCW said earlier that Syria’s declared chemical arms production equipment had been destroyed ahead of a Friday deadline.

The organization’s head of field operations, Jerry Smith, told the BBC his team had “personally observed all the destruction activities.”

“They are not now in a position to conduct any further production or mixing of chemical weapons.”

The OPCW inspectors had visited all 23 chemical weapons sites but for two in areas considered “too dangerous,” Smith said. “But the contents (of those two) were moved to other sites that we did visit. Therefore we have visited and seen the destruction of all Syria’s declared chemical weapons capability.”

The OPCW statements came as Brahimi held meetings in Damascus with opposition members tolerated by the regime.

Meanwhile, Polish photojournalist Marcin Suder, managed to escape his captors and is back home, Poland’s Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday.

“He was very lucky, he managed to escape,” ministry spokesman Marcin Wojciechowski told AFP without elaborating.

Suder, a 34-year-old freelancer who worked for the Corbis agency and other outlets, was abducted by masked gunmen on July 24 during a raid on a media center in Saraqeb, in the mainly rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib.