The Iraqi government withheld recent casualty figures from the United Nations, fearing they would be used to present a grim picture of Iraq that would undermine the coalition's security efforts, UN officials said Wednesday.

Working with its own figures, the UN released a new human rights report Wednesday saying that sectarian violence continued to claim the lives of a large number of Iraqi civilians in Sunni Arab and Shiite neighborhoods of Iraq's capital, despite the coalition's new Baghdad security plan. Begun February 14, it has increased US and Iraqi troops levels in the capital.

The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) report said civilian casualties in the daily violence between January 1 and March 31 remained high, concentrated in and around Baghdad.

The agency also expressed concern about the treatment of detainees under the US-Iraqi operation to pacify the capital, saying that families and other people were often randomly taken into custody, with more than 3,000 people in detention by the end of March.

For the first time, UNAMI said, its assessment of the human rights situation in Iraq did not contain overall death figures from the Iraqi government because it refused to release them, omitting what many had viewed as a rare, reliable indicator of suffering in Iraq.

The Iraqi government Wednesday called the assessment "inaccurate" and "unbalanced" and warned it put the UN's credibility at stake.

UN human rights officer Ivana Vuco said the government did not officially given a reason for refusing to release the numbers but it apparently "was becoming increasingly concerned about the figures being used to portray the situation as very grim."

"Unofficially however in a number of follow-up meetings to their decision we were told that there were concerns that the people would construe the figures to portray the situation negatively and that would further undermine their efforts to establish some kind of security and stability in the country," she said at a news conference at the mission's heavily fortified compound in Baghdad.

"We found the decision to be rather unfortunate because the figures were helping us... to understand the scope of the problem," she said. "In our view it is the government's responsibility and they are probably the only ones with the real capacity to gather the figures in a systematic manner."

Mission spokesman Said Arikat said the reason appeared to be that after the publication of its last human rights report on January 16, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office told UNAMI its mortality figures were exaggerated, "but our figures were taken credibly they are probably among the most carefully screened figures."

He urged the government to reconsider its decision, saying the figures it could provide could "actually show what is going on in Iraq. Otherwise there will be a great deal of speculation."

Numbers for Iraqi civilians killed since the US-led invasion began in March 2003 vary widely and are believed to be vastly underreported, in part because of political pressure.

The last UN report was issued in January found that 34,452 civilians were killed last year, including 6,376 in November and December, based on information from the Iraqi Health Ministry, hospitals across the country and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad. Iraqi officials have complained that the numbers were too high.

(China Daily via agencies April 26, 2007)