Italian Troops exposed to depleted uranium

It looks as if Italian troops are being sent to pick up the pieces of depleted uranium bombs dropped by the US and UK in various parts of the world. Are Italians, once again, being treated as expendible third world soldiers?
“We handle depleted uranium bombs with bare hands”. This is what Italian soldiers said in 1993.

A military document demonstrates that radioactive bombs are kept in Italian bases with little attention to health and safety.

This is a story about silence. Silence about the fact that Italian soldiers pick up the depleted uranium bombs that were fired in war zones. This certainly happened in Somalia, it could have happened in Iraq with the NBC (nuclear, bacteriological, chemical) forces, who were stationed at Bassora. The troops in Somalia collected pieces of radioactive material, together with sand, from where the bombs fell. They put this material into metal containers and transported it to Italy, where the contaminated material was dealt with by workmen, often unprotected.

And they didn’t choose to do this.

L’Unione Sarda newspaper got hold of a 2001 military document which proved that the soldiers had been handling depleted uranium bombs, without knowing that that was what they were.

This document is a request for health checks from the artificieri (whose names have been covered up to protect them) from a base in Tuscany. The document is addressed to those in command, requesting that the organization responsible for carrying out health checks should carry out these checks.

These are the key passages from the document, (the signs that appear at the beginning indicate, according to NATO codes, perforating anti tank depleted uranium bombs: the brackets are in the original).

“As far as depleted uranium is concerned the personel specified here were working with anti tank bombs from Lot 105/51 mm APFS/DS-T-DM33 (depleted uranium) and with explosive and non-explosive material (including sacks of sand and various materials). These materials were brought back from other areas (areas at risk) in containers and military vehicles to be counted and deposited in a temporary store, prior to being taken back to the deposit.

We would like to bring to your attention the fact that when the work was carried out on the sum total of the bombs returning from Somalia, the outer shells, when they returned to the munitions deposit, showed signs of having been under water and they were malformed, so that it was difficult to establish which of the bombs, or how many of them, were in good condition, without a more detailed examination.

In order to accertain whether the bombs were still usable, the workers opened the boxes and containers and took the bombs out. Then they cleaned the shells and the bombs with wire wool where they were oxidised. Then they polished the shells and bombs with vaseline oil and jute cloth, after which they put them back into their containers, now clean and perfect.

The conclusion of our request is: the personel who carried out this work did it without taking any precautions because they thought they were dealing with materials that were the same as any other materials in the store. We await a detailed response and the health checks that we requested and thank you for your attention. 12/01/2001

Yours faithfully


The artificiere personel

The Ibis Mission in Somalia began in December 1992 and ended in January 1994. Eleven Italian soldiers lost their lives there.

The work on the bombs and contaminated sand was carried out in January 2001.
The reason for this was: when questions were raised in parliament on the 21st Dec 2000 concerning the illnesses and deaths possibly caused by depleted uranium, (reported by the Unione Sarda and Libero newspapers), the minister of defence, Sergio Mattarella (Ulivo party, under the government of Giuliano Amato) admitted that 10,800 radioactive bombs were dropped in Bosnia, but denied that these munitions were used in the poligono of Teulada (Somalia?)

In a few days soldiers of the 7th Regiment NBC stationed at Civitavecchia will be in Iraq. Will they be bringing anything back to Italy? Where will it be stored?
direzione-tecnica@misteriditalia.com

SABBIA CONTAMINATA E FRAMMENTI DEI COLPI SPARATI IN SOMALIA NELLA GUERRA DEL ’93 di Marco Mostallino da: L'Unione Sarda, 29 maggio 2003

Contaminated sand and fragments of the bombs that were fired during the war in Somalia in 1993.
By Marco Mostallino. From L’Unione Sarda, 29 March 2003