Turkey and Syria have reached an agreement to avert a possible armed conflict across the borders as Damascus pledged to close down Kurdish rebel training camps Lebanon.

The News was broke to reporters today (21 October), by Foreign Minister Ismail Cem. He said Syrian and Turkish security officials, who have been engaged in secret negotiation, for two days at the southern Turkish town of Seyhan, (350 miles from Ankara) signed an agreement last night (20 October.)

The agreement was signed by Turkish foreign ministry official Ugur Ziyal and Gen. Adnan Badr Al Hassan of Syria.

The two sides also agreed that Syrian would prevent Kurdistan Worker's Party PKK guerrillas from carrying cross-border attacks on Turkey.

In a reply to a question Mr. Cem said Syria agreed to brand the PKK, a ``terrorist organisation'' and would not let PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan into Syria.

The handing over of Mr. Ocalan was a demand put by Turkey when it first massed troops o the borders with Syria last week

``An important foreign support to terrorism has thus been eliminated,'' Mr. Cem told pressmen here.

The stand off reached a climax last week after almost two months of tension, as Damascus was unhappy with an Israeli Turkish military pact. Ankara suggested it might resort to military action to stop what it denounced as Syria's sheltering of Kurdish rebels.

Earlier, Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz said Ocalan, paved the way for a climb down by both when he said the wanted PKK leader Mr. Oclan was no longer in Syria but in Russia, and Turkey had requested his extradition.

Mr. Yilmaz has been less jingoistic than President Demirel and the Military.

In Moscow, the Russian foreign ministry said it had no information about Ocalan entering Russia.

But, according to Kurdish journalists, Mr. Ocalan was in Kurdistan, a region that stretches over parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Early this month Mr. Ocalan was seen in Iraqi Kurdistan trying to forge an alliance with the Iraqi Kurds who made peace after American mediation, but his request was turned down by the two famous Iraqi Kurdish leaders Jallal Talabani and Massoud Barazani.

The PKK has been fighting for autonomy in Turkey's Southeast since 1984 in a war that has cost the lives of 37,000 people. Turkey says the PKK had several camps in Syria and in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

``Syria has understood the Turkish side's demands and is on the verge of meeting them,'' Turkish Defence Minister Ismet Sezgin told reporters three hours before the accord was announced.