Iraq and Kuwait have separately asked for an independent assessment of the health hazards to local people and soldiers of the depleted uranium ammunition, used in battle for the first time in the Gulf war 10 years ago.

The requests were revealed yesterday by Pekka Haavisto, head of the Balkans depleted uranium assessment team, who has been asked to take on the job.

His team has just completed an investigation for the UN Environment Programme of the nine tonnes of depleted uranium used in the Nato assault on Serbian forces in Kosovo. The mineral is used to reinforce the tips of armour-piercing munitions.

In the Gulf war, 350 tonnes were used in attacks on Iraqi armour, but no independent study of its dangers has ever been made, partly because of Nato resistance. Both Iraq and Kuwait have a potentially deadly problem of uncleared DU ammunition.

Iraq asked the UN secretary general Kofi Annan to help, and Kuwait approached the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

US and British veterans of the war to expel Iraq from Kuwait suspect that depleted uranium is the cause of Gulf war syndrome, the unexplained illnesses suffered by many of those who served in the conflict. Iraq has blamed it for a rash of childhood cancers.

The team's findings in Kosovo have gone a long way to dispel fears that the mildly radioactive ammunition will have a long-term effect on the health of local people.

But in the Gulf it may be a different story. The hot, dry climate and the volume of ammunition used may mean there is a far greater and continuing hazard. Dr Haavisto gave his final report on the Kosovo study at the Djakova garrison, near the Albanian border, where 300 DU rounds were fired. The garrison is one of 120 sites in Kosovo where such ammunition was used. Criticising Nato for delays in telling his team where DU was used, he said it was clear that some shells had been found and removed before it arrived on the scene.

Some rounds had penetrated concrete foundations and were buried deep in the soil beneath. Even so, detectors at the point of entry registered 15 times the normal level of background radiation.

Dr Haavisto said research in Kuwait and Iraq would be hampered by the passage of time. The large number of tanks destroyed in the Gulf war by depleted uranium rounds meant that a great deal of toxic dust had been released. Since there was virtually no rain, the dust could still be blowing around, he said.

Until the team arrived it was impossible to tell how much of a threat threat remained. "But radioactivity does not go away," he said. "We should be able to find enough evidence to try and assess the present risks to health, and something of the past."

There was no such dust to worry about in Kosovo because the team had not found no armour had actually been hit with such rounds. Most of the armour-piercing rounds had burrowed into the ground, probably as much as two metres deep.

Where ammunition was known to be buried, as at Djakova, any risk could be removed by covering the area with concrete.

He recommended the local authorities to test the water supply routinely to see if there was depleted uranium present. It was not known how long the uranium would take to seep through the soil but it could appear in the water supply in 10 years.

This summer Dr Haavisto's team hopes to investigate Bosnia, where three tonnes of the ammunition was used five years ago. The main purpose was to assess claims of a higher incidence of cancer in some villages, and to check the water supply.

He also criticised the US because traces of uranium 236 - an isotope found only in spent nuclear fuel - and plutonium had been found in the Kosovo armour-piercing rounds. The tiny amounts did not increase the risk to local people, but it was "a little bit alarming".