PARIS, May 17 (Xinhua) -- French aircraft carrier Clemenceau returned home on Wednesday after failing to find a foreign country willing to dismantle the aged giant.

    The 27,000-tonne Clemenceau docked at 10:00 a.m. (0800 GMT) at the Breton naval base at Brest Port in northwestern France which she first occupied in 1961, beginning 36 years of service with the navy, French news channel TF1 reported.

    Clemenceau, 266 metres long and 51 metres wide, saw action in the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s and the first Gulf war in 1991. She was retired in 1997.

    The Clemenceau has long been in search of a harbour where she could be dismantled. She was rejected by Turkey and Greece, which cited a series of chemical hazards such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), TBT (tributyltin), asbestos, and in all probability, radioactive waste on board.

    The French authorities had committed to decontaminating the ship in Spain, but for inexplicable reasons she never made it to her European neighbor's ports. The French also tried to pass off the ship to China, which refused her entry.

    Greenpeace and other environmental groups have argued that she carried between 500 and 1,000 tons of asbestos, far more than the 45 tons the French government first reported. For a long time the Clemenceau lay stranded in the Mediterranean, as no country was willing to take her for scrapping.

    In 2005 Paris tried to send the Clemenceau to India for demolition but the Egyptian authorities blocked her passage through the Suez Canal on safety grounds.

    In February 2006, the Indian High Court banned the Clemenceau from entering the country's territorial waters and on Feb. 15 2006,on the eve of a visit to India, French President Jacques Chirac ordered the ship back home.

    The French authorities have now to decide how and where to get her dismantled. But French Defense Ministry promised to settle the problem by 2008. Enditem