'Wash Post' Cites 'Pressure' on Iraq Death Count

By: E&P Staff A day after reporting a shockingly high death toll in the current sectarian violence -- 1,300, or about four times the official figure -- The Washington Post returned to the subject today. On Tuesday, most other news outlets, including The Associated Press and Knight Ridder, questioned the Post's number, which it had obtained at the Baghdad morgue.

Iraqi officials also called the 1,300 number "inaccurate" and "exaggerated." The Post said it had received confirmation from one Iraqi official that it was at least 1,000 or more.

Today, Ellen Knickmeyer, who co-authored the Tuesday story, observed that officials overseeing Baghdad's morgue "have come under pressure not to investigate the soaring number of apparent cases of execution and torture in the country, the former U.N. human rights chief for Iraq said Tuesday.

"John Pace, who left his post this month, spoke as Iraqi and U.S. officials offered widely varying numbers for the toll so far in the explosion of sectarian violence that followed last Wednesday's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.

"Pace said the pressure had come from 'both sides,' but declined to give further details. The statement seemed to refer to both the Shiite-led government and the Sunni insurgency fighting it."

Knickmeyer also explained the Post's count: "On Monday, workers at Baghdad's main morgue said that more than 1,300 bodies had been brought in since the previous Wednesday and that 200 to 300 bodies remained unclaimed. Washington Post reporters saw several dozen bodies on the floor and on gurneys and tables in the entry halls outside the main rooms of the morgue. All the dead appeared to be victims of violence, as did the men in photographs of what morgue workers said were the unclaimed dead."

But she added: "On Tuesday, the acting director of the morgue, Qais Hassan, denied that the morgue had received 1,300 bodies, according to the Reuters news agency. He said only 309 bodies had come in. However, even that figure, added to the more than 80 deaths in cities outside Baghdad reported by news media from Wednesday to Monday, exceeds the 379 deaths nationwide that Jafari cited.

"News media tolls generally are lower than the actual tally of the dead, because not all news of attacks reaches the media, and because killings with only one victim generally are not reported unless the victims are notable figures or killed in bombings."

Pace, speaking by phone from his home in Sydney, told the Post that some of the officials connected with the morgue had been put "under a lot of these pressures" and had been threatened in the past and told not to investigate the killings of those brought to the morgue "precisely because it was considered a way of attributing responsibility for such crimes."

The pressure would be to underreport the numbers "or to ignore them," Pace said. "I think the pressure would be not to take into account the totality of cases."

"The ultimate objective is not to count the bodies" in political killings, Pace said. "The objective is to use that data in order to take measures to prevent its recurrence, and to take measures to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice."