· Maliki office calls report on sectarian toll inaccurate
· UK denied transit visa to co-author of Lancet study

Thursday April 26, 2007

The UN yesterday accused the Iraqi government of trying to cover up a rise in civilian casualties from sectarian violence since the troop surge ordered by George Bush earlier this year.

Iraq's government had withheld civilian casualty statistics because it feared the data would be used to depict a "very grim" security situation, claimed the UN officials in Baghdad.

Amid growing political sensitivity to death toll figures, it also emerged yesterday that Canadian scientists had complained that the British government last week denied a transit visa to an Iraqi colleague, Riyadh Lafta, an epidemiologist and co-author of a Lancet report that had estimated the Iraqi war dead at more than 650,000. The Foreign Office said yesterday that it was investigating his case.

The availability of official numbers of the civilian dead and wounded seems to have declined since President Bush gambled with an increase in troops in Iraq - a last-ditch effort to turn the tide on the insurgency and sectarian bloodshed.

A human rights report published yesterday by the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq (Unami) estimates that the death toll is rising, despite 30,000 American reinforcements being ordered into Baghdad and a security clampdown since February.

"While government officials claimed an initial drop in the number of killings in the latter half of February following the launch of the Baghdad security plan, the number of reported casualties rose again in March," the Unami study says.

The report also finds the rate of ethnic cleansing accelerating in Baghdad as the city becomes increasingly divided along Shia and Sunni lines. It quotes figures, compiled by the UN high commissioner for refugees, estimating that nearly three-quarters of a million people were forced to flee their homes in the past year - with 200,000 leaving since last December.

The office of Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, issued a statement calling the report "inaccurate" and "unbalanced", adding that it aggravated the humanitarian crisis in Iraq "instead of solving it".

The UN denied the claims and called for greater government transparency. Civilian casualty figures were previously routinely compiled and passed on to the UN, but with the rise in insurgency and sectarian killings and the heightening of the political stakes, the issue of the death toll has become taboo.

"We were told that the government was becoming increasingly concerned about the figures being used to portray the situation as very grim," Ivana Vuco, a Unami human rights officer, told a news conference in Baghdad yesterday.

In October, the Lancet medical journal published the epidemiological study that estimated that since the March 2003 invasion 655,000 Iraqis had died who would otherwise have lived, a number far in excess of any official estimates. The methodology behind the report, which was overseen by Johns Hopkins University in the US, was criticised by the American and British governments and questioned by other medical researchers.

Dr Lafta had arranged to present the findings of the report at the University of Washington last year but was denied a US visa. Last Friday he was due to present a paper at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, Canada. This paper looked at the rise in cancer levels among Iraqi children since the invasion.

He was issued a Canadian visa, but British consular officials in Jordan refused last week to grant him a transit visa to pass through London, said Tim Takaro, an associate professor at the university. Dr Takaro said: "Why would an academic physician not be granted a visa? I've grown accustomed to this from the US, but I was very disappointed the British would not even give him a transit visa to pass through an airport."

A Foreign Office spokesman yesterday said he had no knowledge of Dr Lafta's case and would look into it.