The British government must acknowledge that thousands of soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf War are suffering serious illnesses as a direct result, a heavyweight inquiry concluded on Wednesday. A damning report said the Ministry of Defense must admit for the first time that “Gulf War Syndrome” exists.

“The Ministry of Defense has never admitted that their illnesses are due to their service in the Gulf,” Lord Lloyd of Berwick, the inquiry chief, told a news conference. “What the veterans now want above all else is a clear recognition…they are ill because they served in the Gulf. Are they entitled to that recognition? In our view they are.”

The inquiry was privately and anonymously funded after the government refused to hold an official investigation.

The question of whether there is a “Gulf War Syndrome” of diseases that affect veterans of the battle to oust Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait has been argued bitterly on both sides of the Atlantic.

Veterans and their supporters suspect vaccines given to troops or other environmental factors have made thousands sick.

Multiple vaccinations to guard against chemical or biological weapons attack, exposure to pesticides, smoke from oil-burning fires, stress and organophosphates (chemicals that have been shown to affect the human nervous system), have been cited as possible causes.

The government says no direct link has been established and veterans are no more likely than others to die because of poor health.

It has repeatedly rejected calls for an official independent inquiry, saying it has spent millions of pounds on research into the question.

Lloyd, a retired judge, said some 6,000 ill Gulf War veterans were being paid war pensions or had received lump sums. “What Professor Simon Wessely calls the Gulf War health effect is indisputable,” Lloyd said.

Wessely, of King’s College London, said last month that Gulf War veterans indisputably suffered more health problems than other members of the military but the cause of the mysterious array of symptoms may never be known for sure.

Lloyd said some had post-traumatic stress disorder but that could not account for the suffering of the majority.

“Stress alone could not explain the illnesses. There was something else as well,” Lloyd said.

He listed a number of possible causes:

- Multiple injections of vaccines. He said some troops received as many as 14 injections in two days.

- Indiscriminate spraying of tents with pesticides.

- Low-level exposure to nerve gas.

- Inhalation of depleted uranium dust.

“The jury is still out,” Lloyd said. “The most likely explanation may be a combination of more than one cause against a background of stress.”