LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) - The man who led the U.S. army's depleted uranium (DU) assessment team in the 1991 Gulf War said on Tuesday that the continued  use of such weapons was a "war crime" which should be stopped immediately.

Speaking at a news conference at Britain's Parliament, Dr Doug Rokke, a major in the U.S. army reserves, said he told his government as far back as 1991 of the health hazards of depleted uranium but his warnings had been consistently ignored.

Rokke, 51, worked in the Gulf from November 1990 to June 1991, leading the U.S. Defence Department's DU assessment team responsible for implementing a clean-up and advising on medical care for any U.S. personnel who had been exposed to DU.

"What we learned during the Gulf War and what we learned during the research scared us," Rokke said.

He said that his full recommendations, detailed in a November 1995 U.S. army pamphlet entitled "handling procedures for equipment contaminated with depleted uranium or other radioactive commodities" had not been passed on to troops or civilians on the ground during NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.

An international storm broke over the use of DU munitions in January after Italy reported that six of its soldiers who served in the Balkans had died of leukaemia.

But NATO chiefs have consistently denied that there is any proof that DU munitions carry any serious health risk and have rejected calls for a moratorium on their use.

Rokke said it was an "absolute lie" that troops and civilians who had been exposed to DU in the Gulf and in the Balkans had not suffered health problems. "We do have birth defects, we do have tumours," he said.

Rokke himself was diagnosed with reactive airway disease due to uranium poisoning.

He accused the NATO governments of covering up health warnings about DU, and said their insistence that the weapons would continue to be used raised serious "moral and ethical" as well as medical issues.

"When you deliberately and wilfully take radioactive waste... and throw it down in place in the world where children can pick it up and be exposed to it... that's a crime against humanity and it is a war crime," he said.

He also reacted angrily to comments by German Defence Minister Rudolf Scharping, who said on Saturday that fears about radiation from DU weapons were being whipped up by opponents of the Kosovo war.

"I'm going to make this loud and clear," Rokke said. "The individuals who started the warnings on depleted uranium hazards... were the U.S. army's experts -- myself and my team members who were tasked with cleaning up after the Gulf War."

British member of parliament Alice Mahon, speaking at the same news conference, called on the British government to ban the use of DU munitions and fund a full and independent study into the risks.

"An epidemiological study and urine analysis for depleted uranium will take some time," she said. "Meanwhile the government should ipose a complete moratorium on the production and use of DU shells."

10:47 01-30-01