Share this story!            

UN raps Iraq for holding back death toll figures: ‘Baghdad security plan fails to reduce violence’

* UN report says over 37,600 detainees in US and Iraqi prisons

BAGHDAD: Sectarian violence continued to claim the lives of a large number of Iraqi civilians in Sunni Arab and Shiite neighbourhoods of Iraq’s capital, despite the coalition’s new Baghdad security plan, the UN said on Wednesday.

In its first human rights report since the security plan was launched on Feb 14 and began increasing US and Iraqi troops levels in the capital the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) said civilian casualties in the daily violence between January and March remained high, concentrated in and around Baghdad.

“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 study said.

But UNAMI also said that for the first time since in began issuing quarterly reports on the human rights situation in Iraq, the new Jan. 1-March 31 one did not contain overall mortality figures from Iraq’s Ministry of Health because it refused to release them.

“UNAMI emphasises again the utmost need for the Iraqi government to operate in a transparent manner, and does not accept the government’s suggestion that UNAMI used the (previous) mortality figures in an inappropriate fashion,” the report said.

The UN agency said that after the publication of its last human rights report about Iraq on Jan. 16, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office told UNAMI its mortality figures were exaggerated, “although they were in fact official figures compiled and provided by a government ministry.”

The new UNAMI report said that on March 1 Iraq’s Ministry of Interior announced that 1,646 civilians were killed in Iraq in February, most of them in Baghdad, but that “it is unclear on what basis these figures were compiled.”

Iraqi detainees: The UN report said at least 37,641 people were being held in US and Iraqi run prisons across the country as of end of March.

Citing figures from the ministry of human rights, UNAMI said that of these about 3,000 have been detained since the Baghdad security crackdown began on February 14 in a bid to quell daily bloodshed in the Iraqi capital. In its quarterly report on human rights situation in Iraq, UNAMI said the US-led coalition forces are holding 17,898 people detained in operations across the country since the March 2003 invasion. agencies

Home | Foreign

Share this story!