Irradiated during the reparation of tanks from Kosovo 

Giuseppe Tripoli, an Italian soldier, and a senior sergeant was not on a mission in Kosovo after the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, but he fell ill from the consequences of depleted uranium. He was discharged from the army when he was only 20 years old after he was diagnosed with a tumor caused by the consequences of this radioactive material used in the attacks of the European military alliance on Serbia, Novosti reports.

The poison, as it turns out, arrived in Italy on tanks and vehicles which were returned from the mission in Kosovo.

This was revealed, in an exclusive interview for "Novosti", by the lawyer Angelo Fiore Tartaglia, who had been fighting with the Italian judiciary for years to find out the truth about the consequences of NATO aggression in 1999. According to lawyer Tartaglia, who had been in Serbia on several occasions and investigated with Serbian colleagues, what happened after the bombing; Tripoli, born in the town of Mazara del Vallo in Sicily in 1980, began his military career when he came of age, in Livorno in the brigade "Folgore".

"He worked with the logistics of the regiment, from where soldiers with military vehicles and material went on a mission to Kosovo. After no more than five months, the vehicles were returned to the base because they either had technical problems, or there was such a rule about replacing them. They had to be fixed and disassembled, and the armor on some of them had to be dismantled. When the first vehicles arrived at the port of Livorno, Giuseppe was assigned that job and he worked on the tanks for a year and a half, at the end of 1999, 2000, and the beginning of 2001. He worked on cleaning the training ground where the vehicles were located".

In those years, Tartaglia reports Tripoli's words, it was not yet known what was happening with the KFOR soldiers who were on a mission in Kosovo. As he says, the word "depleted uranium" did not exist on the Apennine Peninsula.

"It was done without any protection, I don't know if it was known at a high hierarchical level, but we soldiers could not know anything about it".

During 2001, the first health problems began - strange fatigue, blisters, and itching on the body. Giuseppe, who today lives in Bergamo, started with tests and in August of the same year, he was diagnosed with a tumor - Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Giuseppe testified to the interlocutor of "Novosti" how he had found out about the terrible truth:
"At that moment, the Ministry of Defense of Italy fired me from my job, I was 20 years old, and the first news began to appear about the typology of sick people in missions from the bombed area and the suspected cause. I was operated on for a tumor on my throat and tumoral nodes on my thyroid, then I was subjected to chemotherapy, then radiotherapy. An analysis of the operated matter was done in the laboratory, and the particles of depleted uranium 238 were found in the throat and middle of the chest... a large amount of heavy metals was found in the blood."

The fight for the truth and compensation for this young soldier, a victim of depleted uranium, lasted for 16 years. Attorney Tartaglia "defeated" all the appeals of the Italian Ministry of Defense, which did not accept the causes of the disease despite all the expertise. They won the fight together, the Battle for Giuseppe, along with another 300 processes, that he led during the 20 years long fight for the victims of depleted uranium.
 
The Italian Ministry of Defence finally recognized the causes of Tripoli's illness.

"In the end, they had to admit what was the cause of the illness, but the documents never say depleted uranium, but illness from special risk factors". I received a pension and a certain sum of money," Tartaglia reports Giuseppe's words.

Bombs also polluted the Adriatic

American A-10 bomber planes scattered missiles, which were prohibited by all international conventions, across the Federative Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999. When they failed to release the bombs for various reasons, they threw them into the Italian part of the Adriatic Sea. Today, more than two decades later, the general public in the Apennines is slowly but surely learning that these bombs with depleted uranium have polluted both the water and the sea life.

Right next to the missiles

Tripoli testified to the lawyer Tartaglia of how one of his friends, who won the battle in court after many years, had been on carriers in the Adriatic Sea:

"I read his documents and those of the Italian Navy and saw that those who were in that operation, when the NATO planes were getting rid of the missiles, were at a distance of about a hundred meters from the place where the bombs were dropped."