A CONFIDENTIAL report by a senior army medical specialist has provided the first official backing for claims that the cocktail of vaccines given to soldiers before the 1991 war with Iraq caused illnesses which became known as Gulf War syndrome.

For 13 years, the Ministry of Defence has denied that the vaccines , some of which were classified as “secret”, could be blamed for the wide range of debilitating diseases.

Independent research projects have also failed to find conclusive evidence of a Gulf War-related syndrome.

However, Lieutenant-Colonel Graham Howe, clinical director of psychiatry with the British Forces Health Service in Germany, was asked by the War Pensions Agency to examine the case of former Lance-Corporal Alex Izett, who, since the war, has been suffering from osteoporosis and acute depression.

Colonel Howe wrote in his report on the former Royal Engineer that the “secret” injections he received prior to his expected deployment to the Gulf “most probably led to the development of autoimmune-induced osteoporosis”.

No other possible causes were highlighted because Mr Izett never went to war.

Like other troops earmarked for frontline service in the Gulf, he was inoculated against anthrax, botulism, plague and other biological warfare agents thought to be in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of non-conventional weapons.

“But at the last moment, my unit (25 Engineer Regiment, was told it wasn’t needed and I never went,” Mr Izett, 33, said from his home in Bersenbruck, near Bremen in Germany.

A copy of the report, dated September 22, 2001, but never made public, has been handed to The Times by Mr Izett, who won a landmark ruling at a war pensions appeals tribunal in July last year which awarded him a 50 per cent disability pension.

The MoD did not appeal against the ruling but maintained that the vaccines could not be the cause of any Gulf War syndrome of illnesses.

The medical report noted that there was a “high incidence” of osteoporosis in Gulf War veterans.

The common denominator linking Mr Izett to those who actually fought in the war was the cocktail of vaccines he received.

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