Serbian doctors have found cancerous tumours in the eyes of two ex-soldiers who served with the Yugoslav army in areas of Kosovo where Nato fired shells containing depleted uranium last year.
"I have always had perfect eyesight and there is no history of cancer in my family," a diconsolate Milan Bisercic told the Guardian yesterday in the Belgrade hospital where he sat with a bandage round his head, covering the socket where his right eye used to be.
"A surgeon took it out on Thursday, the day after I was rushed here. I noticed my sight was going funny in December. It got steadily worse and in 25 days the right eye was virtually blind," he explained.
Still stunned by his sudden disability, he declined to be photographed.
In a neighbouring ward is Stanisa Zivkovic, another veteran of the Kosovo war whose sight has been struck by an unexplained cancer. Both men served in Urosevac in central Kosovo, one of 112 sites that Nato confirmed recently had been targeted by American planes using DU munitions.
The two men are the first confirmed cases of cancer among Kosovo veterans from the Yugoslav army, although there is no proof that their illnesses were caused by radiation from DU. Like Nato governments, the Yugoslav army has been trying to play down the effect of DU exposure on its soldiers.
The Milosevic regime, which was ousted last autumn, made a great propaganda play about Nato's use of DU, describing it as a war crime. But it never admitted that any civilian or soldier had been found with suspected radiation-caused illnesses.
The army checked 1,100 of the more than 100,000 soldiers who served in Kosovo, according to a senior medical source at Belgrade's military academy hospital, and says it found no problems.
"But the question is what kind of examination did they perform and what specialised equipment did they use," the Yugoslav army doctor said yesterday. He was not part of the team which checked the men.
A Belgrade weekly tabloid, Nedeljni Telegraf, reported last week that three officers from the Pristina Corps died of leukaemia in recent months and 10 other soldiers are ill with the disease; four of them terminally.
They were all stationed near Prizren, in areas of western Kosovo where Nato dropped many DU weapons because of a large concentration of tanks and armoured vehicles. They were deployed to prevent the Kosovo Liberation Army moving men in from Albania.
One man who died earlier this month was a member of the personal escort team for General Nebojsa Pavkovic, who commanded Yugoslav land forces in Kosovo throughout the war, according to the newspaper. The general is currently Yugoslav chief of staff.
The newspaper did not name any of the sick or dead veterans, and the Yugoslav army has denied the report.
While refusing so far to confirm any link between DU and sickness among soldiers and civilians since the Kosovo war, the authorities were quicker than Nato in ordering measures to protect people.
After reports in Italy and Portugal at the beginning of this month exposed unex plained cancer deaths among Nato soldiers, international peacekeepers only began last week to use warning tape to seal off sites in Kosovo where DU struck.
"We were asked to go down to southern Serbia long ago," Snezhana Pavlovic, the head of the radiation and environmental protection department at Yugoslavia's Vinca Institute of Nuclear Science, said. "Of course we have no access to Kosovo where most of the DU was used. But seven sites were struck in southern Serbia. We checked them for radiation and ruled out three. The other four contaminated areas have been sealed off."
Her team retrieved parts of DU-tipped shells from fields and hillsides. "Nato says it fired up to 3,000 DU rounds in southern Serbia. So far we've only found fragments from 100 shells," she said. "We are still trying to check the area more precisely."
Back in his hospital ward in Belgrade, Mr Bisercic recalls seeing the repeated Nato attacks on the barracks at Urosevac during his two months in Kosovo last year. He and other members of his scout unit were living in Albanian houses whose owners had fled or been expelled.
"I was never closer than 500 metres to the explosions, so I don't know why I should have got radiated more than anyone else, if that was what gave me cancer," he said.
"The surgeon said he could not prove the cause was DU. Until I read about it in the papers last week, I had never heard of DU."
A 36-year-old reserve officer from Brus, Mr Bisercic was called up and sent to Kosovo about a month after Nato started its bombing campaign.
The father of two used to work in a tractor factory in Krusevac. "My job involved using an oxyacetylene cutter on metal. I asked the surgeon if that could have caused the tumour," he said helplessly. "He thought it was impossible. So now I just don't know why I've lost my eye."
•The head of the Greek Orthodox church, Archbishop Christodoulos, yesterday accused Nato of creating "ruins and catastrophes" in Kosovo.
During a sermon after a one-day trip to visit Greek peacekeepers, the archbishop, an outspoken critic of the war, claimed the Nato attacks had destroyed life for Christian Orthodox Serbs in the province.