6 January 2001

Like many young soldiers in the Italian army, Salvatore Carbonaro came from a modest family – in his case from a small town in Sicily – with an urgent need to find regular work. In 1998 he agreed to spend two months in Bosnia because he thought the money would be good. A few months later, he did a second tour of duty, based in Sarajevo; both times he served as a gunner with the Garibaldi regiment.

"He had contact with dangerous materials like benzene. We even have photographs of Salvatore next to weaponry that could have fired the notorious depleted uranium missiles," his brother Mauro explained recently.

In the summer of 1999 Salvatore was diagnosed with a rare form of acute lymphoid leukaemia and put on a strict regime of chemotherapy. At first he responded positively, but then he deteriorated rapidly and died in November at a hospital in the northern city of Pavia. He was 24.

His family suspected a link with his military duties, but until the politicians paid attention their entreaties for official explanations fell on deaf ears.

"We even have a toxicology report that shows that my brother had contact with substances considered high-risk for illnesses like leukaemia," Mauro said in an interview with a Pavia paper this week.

His sister Lella has been even more forthright. "There's something in this affair that they want to keep hidden," she said. "I'm sure that one of Salvatore's superiors shares responsibility for his death. They have every interest in making sure the truth does not emerge."

The families of the other seven Italian cancer victims being investigated for possible contact with depleted uranium have similar stories to tell.

Captain Giuseppe Benetti, who was 34 when he died in 1998, spent several months in Bosnia in 1996 before contracting a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His illness, initially blamed by his superiors on stress, is being investigated by a military prosecutor as a possible case of manslaughter.

Sergeant Marco Riccardi, 27, spent three months as a gunner in Bosnia before contracting a rare form of muscle cell cancer. Again, his family had to shout to have his case noticed at all.

One of the earliest victims was Rinaldo Colombo, an officer in the carabinieri, Italy's paramilitary police force. When he returned from a two-year tour of Bosnia in 1997, he married his childhood sweetheart.

Later that summer, he started having repeat episodes of high fever, migraine and vomiting. At first his doctors failed to diagnose him; after two years going from hospital to hospital, he finally discovered he had leukemia and died in September 1999. He was 31.