Syria museums chief condemns blast of ancient temple in Palmyra

General Director of Syrian Antiquities and Museums Mamoun Abdulkarim condemned on Monday the detonation of an ancient temple in Syria's millennia-old city of Palmyra by the hands of the Islamic State (IS) militants.

"This is a criminal act against the World Heritage sites in Syria," Abdulkarim told Xinhua, a day after the IS detonated an ancient temple in Palmyra in central Syria.

Abdulkarim said the IS militants blew up the temple of Baal Shamin, or "Lord of the Heavens," on Sunday after the terror-labeled group rigged it with large quantities of explosives before sending it up in flames.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog group said it had testimonies from people who fled Palmyra that the blast took place a month ago.

Abdulkarim stressed that the temple was blown up on Sunday.

He said since the IS entered Palmyra last May, it started destroying buildings, adding that the city awaits "unknown future" if it remains under the terror group's control.

"If the city remained under their control, we will witness painful scenes of destruction and acts of arson," he said, urging the international community to shoulder its responsibility to protect the archaeological sites.

The temple is located just tens of meters from the famous Romanian Theater of Palmyra.

The IS terror group seized full control of Palmyra, otherwise known as Tadmur, on May 20 this year.

Since capturing it, the terror-labeled group destroyed the city's notorious military prison and several Islamic tombs. The IS also committed public executions of government soldiers and people accused of working for the government.

Their latest execution was against Khaled Asaad, a prominent Syrian archaeologist, who had lived in Palmyra for most of his life and dedicated his carrier to study the archaeological sites of Palmyra.

Government officials said the IS militants were trying to extract information from Asaad about the "hidden gold" of Palmyra, which, they said, don't even exist.

Palmyra contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centers of the ancient world.

Syria has many prehistoric, Greek, Byzantine and Islamic heritages. Before the crisis, Syria had attracted many multinational archaeological missions coming for searching new clues of historical facts on the development of civilizations. Endit