However, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw downplayed speculation that Syria was next on the list of US and British targets after the war to topple Saddam and track down his alleged weapons of mass destruction.

"There has been much evidence of considerable cooperation between the Syrian government and the Saddam regime in recent months," Straw told a press conference in Kuwait on the second leg of a Gulf tour.

"It's very important for Syria to appreciate that there is a new reality now that the Saddam regime has gone," Straw said.

Straw noted that junior foreign minister Mike O'Brien was in Damascus on Monday, and that Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke on the telephone last week with President Bashar al-Assad.

The British foreign secretary had talks with Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara on Friday.

Straw's claims added to a pile of allegations Washington and London have been levelling at Damscus over the past week.

The United States sent tensions with Syria soaring on Sunday, when President George W. Bush claimed: "We believe there are chemical weapons in Syria."

But he did not elaborate on what action the United States might have planned, apart from saying that "each situation will require a different response."

Despite the heightened rhetoric, Straw said in Bahrain that Syria was not next on the list for pre-emptive US military treatment, and "that there is no plan for Syria to be on the list."

US officials fear that Syria has been taking in fleeing members of Saddam's regime and has been developing weapons of mass destruction -- principally with the aim of threatening Israel.

Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said the Jewish state would brook no threat from Damascus.

"At this stage, Washington has shown the Syrians the yellow card and it's up to the Americans to decide if they should also show the red card," he said in an interview with the Israeli daily Maariv published Monday.

The terms, borrowed from soccer, referred respectively to giving a player a serious warning and eliminating them from a game.

In London, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon told a press briefing Monday that Britain feared Syria might use fleeing Iraqi experts to pursue chemical weapons programmes.

"We are anxious that they should not take advantage of any scientific or military figures crossing the border," he said.

In Damascus, the British embassy said O'Brien had met Assad and Shara Monday but made no mention of any discussion on Syria's position.

Instead it quoted O'Brien as saying after their talks that "Saddam Hussein is finished. The coalition will go home as soon as the Iraqi people have an elected government."

A spokeswoman for the Syrian foreign ministry, Bussaina Shaaban, later told the BBC from Damascus that "many of these allegations addressed to Syria are absolutely groundless".

She added: "The secretary of defence (Donald Rumsfeld) knows that the only country in the region who has chemical, biological and nuclear weapons is Israel and it's not Syria."

Syria, she said "had always been against the Iraqi regime, we never had friendly relations with them and certainly none of them even applied to come to Syria."

US commanders managing the war in Iraq have stressed that their forces encountered many Syrians among the foreigners who fought for Baghdad.

Syria, a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, vocally opposed US and British war plans for Iraq and sided with China, France, Germany and Russia in withholding UN authorisation for the conflict.

SPACE.WIRE