PRAGUE, April 5 (Xinhua) - An anti-chemical weapons training center for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its Partnership for Peace countries was opened in the Czech Republic Monday, Czech Chief of Staff Pavel Stefka said.

    As NATO's only chemical warfare training camp, the Vyskov-basedcenter will create norms and regulations for NATO chemical warfaretroops. The Vyskov center is the 10th NATO training center.

    The Czech Republic pledged to build the center at the 2002 Prague NATO summit.

    "The center has global importance and we created it because as a member of NATO we are specialized on the chemical warfare and ondefense from weapons of mass destruction," Stefka said.

    The center will hire 25 employees from the Vyskov military academy and will use the laboratories in Vyskov and the near-by chemical training grounds where traces of dangerous chemicals are used, he said.

    The center will cost two million Czech crowns (about 77,000 USdollars) to set up and another 800 million crowns (about 30.7 million dollars) will be invested in the compound by 2010.

    Although the center is not scheduled to officially receive NATOaccreditation until next January, it has already begun to train 400 foreign specialists.

    Troops from Austria started a training course on Monday. Specialists from Estonia, Saudi Arabia and Greece have all expressed interest in the courses.

    Czech troops are well-known for their special abilities in combatting chemical weapons. A contingent of Czech chemical warfare troops were sent to Iraq last year to prepare for a possible chemical war when US-led troops began to invade Iraq. Enditem