NATO will discuss the use of depleted uranium ammunition in the former Yugoslavia at a meeting next week after mounting
international pressure for an investigation into the so-called "Balkan syndrome" which may have affected allied soldiers who
served there.

Italy requested new information from the alliance on the use of the substance yesterday, and said it will raise the issue at a
scheduled meeting of the North Atlantic Council in light of the deaths of six of its servicemen from leukaemia.

Although it is not on the meeting's agenda, Italy will be able to raise its concerns on 10 January, either as part of a discussion on
the Balkans or under other business, Nato officials confirmed.

Disquiet over the use of depleted uranium in ammunition has been growing, with Finland, Spain, Portugal and France looking
into the matter and Belgium's Defence Minister, André Flahaut, calling on all European Union defence ministers to follow suit.

The pressure on Nato to act was stepped up by the Italian Prime Minister, Guiliano Amato, who hinted that he does not believe
the alliance's assurances that the ammunition posed no health risk.

"This is a very delicate situation," Mr Amato said in La Repubblica, an Italian daily newspaper. "We've always known that
[depleted uranium] was used in Kosovo but not in Bosnia. We've always known it was a danger only in absolutely exceptional
circumstances, like, for example, picking up a fragment with a hand on which there was an open wound, while in normal
circumstances it isn't dangerous at all," he said. "Now we fear things may not be so simple."

Italy said last week that it would investigate illnesses among its soldiers who were deployed in Kosovo after Nato's 78-day
bombing campaign in 1999, although the concerns date back to deployments in the earlier Balkan conflict in Bosnia.

The announcement set off a chain reaction, with Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Finland saying they would screen their Kosovo
veterans. In London, the Ministry of Defence said it was "closely monitoring" investigations being carried out by its Nato allies
into whether soldiers were exposed to dangerous levels of depleted uranium.

The Portuguese Foreign Minister, Jaime Gama, and his Belgian counterpart, Louis Michel, whose countries have also reported
deaths among soldiers who served in the Balkans, said yesterday that the truth had to be established.

A Nato official said the alliance was doing its best to provide all the information it could to the Italians "as a matter of priority".
But, he said, the task was made difficult because the Bosnian conflict took place five years ago. "Nevertheless we are taking the
Italian concerns very seriously and are acting as fast as we can."

In Kosovo, US warplanes used armour-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium mostly in the central, western and
south-western parts of the province – areas where Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese peacekeepers were later deployed.

The report of a UN task force sent to Kosovo to look into the ammunition risks is expected next month. Officials at the
alliance's headquarters in Brussels are confident it will find no evidence of a link with cancer.