The Van der Goen law firm stated on its Internet site that it had been "mandated by the Ivorian lawyers for the victims to sue (Trafigura) for damages", but did not specify the amount.

Trafigura had been informed that the ship, the Probo Koala, was carrying toxic substances, the ANP agency reported on Monday.

Van der Goen has accused Trafigura of being aware that the west African country did not have the capacity to treat the waste safely, ANP added.

The vessel was sent to Ivory Coast to unload the waste at a cost of 15,000 euros (18,800 dollars) after it had already cost several hundreds of thousands of euros (dollars) in Amsterdam, ANP reported.

The ship docked in Abidjan, the country's economic capital, on August 19 with 528 tonnes of petroleum waste that it had already tried to unload in the Netherlands, according to Dutch authorities.

The waste was then dumped by an Ivorian company, Tommy, with some of it being unloaded into an open-air waste disposal site in Abidjan.

The resulting pollution killed ten people and left 69 in hospital, according to a recent assessment.

Trafigura, which is owned by its founders and high-ranking managers, is a multi-national company based in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Eric de Turckheim, the director of Trafigura's Dutch parent firm Trafigura Beheer, told AFP this month that the company had respected the laws of the country and would cooperate with any Ivorian legal proceedings.

Along with the inquiry into the dumped pollutants in the Ivory Coast and in the Netherlands, the company faces an investigation in the Netherlands into alleged fraud in connection with the "Oil for food" programme, organised by the United Nations in Saddam Hussein's Iraq between 1996 and 2003.