LONDON - A new front opened on Monday in the probe into the safety of depleted uranium ammunition as environmentalists demanded the cleanup of waters around Scotland where shells were test fired for 10 years.

The environmental group Friends of the Earth and a Scottish parliamentarian demanded the cleanup after Britain's defence ministry said it had fired more than 6,000 shells containing depleted uranium into west Scotland's Solway Firth over the past decade and left them on the seabed.

Richard Dixon, spokesman for Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: "This is a very serious issue, particularly in light of reports of illness among soldiers in Bosnia."

"We are calling on the Defence Ministry to bring in their detection equipment and remove these shells," he said.

The use of depleted uranium in Kosovo and Bosnia has triggered concern among some European NATO members that it might be linked to illness among Balkan peacekeepers, a condition dubbed "Balkans Syndrome" after reports that six Italian soldiers who served in the former Yugoslavia had developed leukaemia and died.

Scottish Nationalist Party parliamentarian Aladair Morgan joined in the demand for a clean up of the seabed.

"If it's good enough to ban beef on the bone on the basis of a (very small)...risk then it would be very sensible to recover all these DU shells and take them away from the area," he told the BBC.

A spokeswoman for the defence ministry said the military was unable to recover the shells "The shells disappear into the silt on the sea-bed making retrieval almost impossible," she said.

She said that tests on the ammunition showed the firings do not pose a significant risk to marine life or the public.

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