NATO agreed yesterday to examine the alliance’s use of depleted uranium weapons in the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts after the number of deaths from cancer among Italian peacekeeping soldiers rose to six. The alliance’s North Atlantic Council, Nato’s highest decision-making body, will discuss the issue next week, after Giuliano Amato, the Italian Prime Minister, and President Ciampi demanded a “full explanation” for claims that peacekeeping troops in the Balkans may have contracted leukaemia through contact with depleted uranium.

Portugal, Finland, Spain and Turkey have announced their intention to screen all their troops who have served in the Balkans and to check radiation levels by collecting air, water and soil samples.

A spokesman for Nato in Brussels said that the alliance would co-operate fully with the Italian authorities and had already launched its own investigation into the alleged “Balkans Syndrome”.

The simmering row over “suspicious deaths” in the Armed Forces shot to the top of the Italian political agenda yesterday, with Communist allies of Signor Amato’s centre-left Government issuing the first calls for Italian troops to be withdrawn altogether.

Alarm over the rising death toll dominated television news bulletins and newspaper front pages. Left-wingers also called for the resignation of Javier Solana, Nato Secretary-General at the time of the Kosovo campaign and now the EU’s high representative for foreign and defence policy. But the Nato spokesman said that it would be “virtually impossible to inhale enough DU (depleted uranium) to pose a health risk”, adding that DU had 40 per cent less radiation than natural uranium in soil and rocks.

In an interview with La Repubblica, Signor Amato said that the situation was very delicate, but that alarm in Italy was more than legitimate.

The Government, he said, had always been led to believe that DU was used in Kosovo but not in Bosnia and that it posed a danger only in exceptional circumstances, such as picking up a fragment of shell with a hand with an open wound. “But we are now beginning to have the justified fear that matters are not so simple,” Signor Amato added.

Sergio Mattarella, the Defence Minister, arrives in Sarajevo today to investigate at first hand; Marco Minniti, the deputy minister, is conducting similar inquiries in Pristina. Nato warplanes — notably American A10 “tank-killers” — used armour-piercing shells in Bosnia in 1995 and more extensively in Kosovo last year.

During the Kosovo crisis, Italy acted as Nato’s “aircraft carrier”, with wave after wave of warplanes taking off from Aviano in northern Italy and Gioia del Colle in southern Italy to bomb Serb targets. The war stretched Italian loyalty to Nato, however, with the former Communists in the ruling Party of the Democratic Left having to contend with strong pacifist and anti-American opinion.

Yesterday Signor Amato denied the issue of leukaemia was causing further strain.

Nato and the Italian authorities maintain that there is “no proven link” between DU and deaths from cancer, but Falco Accame, a retired army commander campaigning on behalf of soldiers’ families, said the Italian Army had issued “belated guidelines” on weapons containing DU which showed that the army itself believed there was a risk.

Five Italian soldiers who served in Balkans postings and one from an Italian firing range have so far died from leukaemia and groups representing the families of members of the Armed Forces say that 30 more are under observation. No Italian troops serving in Kosovo are yet known to have died of cancer, but campaigners say that several are ill and point out that leukaemia takes 18 months to two years to develop.

The sixth to die was named yesterday as Salvatore Carbonaro, 24, an armourer from Syracuse in Sicily, who died of leukaemia at a hospital in Pavia after an 18-month illness. Friends said he had been “fit, healthy and full of life” before going to Bosnia in 1998.