Official Says Shiite Party Suppressed Body Count

Four days later, another Post reporter who went to the morgue was told by workers that the facility contained more than 200 unclaimed bodies at that time.

Morgue and Health Ministry officials say morgue workers were barely able to keep up with the arrival of bodies. Iraq's state-run pharmaceutical company lent the ministry "six or seven'' refrigerated trailers to handle the overflow, according to the ministry official. Bodies that went unclaimed were buried in cemeteries in Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala.

In all, the Health Ministry official said, more than 1,000 people died in the first six days of violence, although it was not clear whether that covered only Baghdad or all of Iraq.

For several days after the Samarra bombing, the government added a daytime curfew to the long-standing one in Baghdad at night in a bid to quell the Shiite-Sunni bloodletting. During the last weekend in February, few vehicles could be seen on Baghdad's streets other than those of government officials, security forces and gunmen dressed in black.

At least one representative of the SCIRI traveled to the Health Ministry, according to the ministry official. On or about Feb. 27, the ministry official said, a party representative directed ministry employees that victims of sectarian killings not associated with insurgent attacks should no longer be recorded. Instead, their names were only to be posted on the morgue wall so that their families could retrieve their bodies.

Contacted a second time this week, the ministry official refused to speak further, saying, "Forget what I told you."

Abdul Razzaq Kadhumi, the prime minister's spokesman, declined Wednesday to give a breakdown of the figure of 379 execution-style killings given by Jafari. "These are obviously terrorist, Saddamist and Baathist acts against civilians, and they all go under victims of terrorism," he said

Kadhumi also declined to give a contact number for Jafari's operations room, where he said the figure was reached. He referred the question to the operations rooms of the Defense and Interior ministries, which said they had a figure only for "terrorists'' killed -- 35 -- from Feb. 22 to March 1 and none for civilians or security forces.

On Tuesday, Yahiya, the Health Ministry spokesman, showed a Post reporter what he said was the official, confidential tally that the Health Ministry sends to the prime minister's office each day. The two-page sheet included only two categories of deaths: "military operations" and "terrorist attacks."

Yahiya said he did not know if the ministry tally included bodies that turned up at morgues in Baghdad and regional capitals of Iraq after having been tortured and shot. "There's always fights between tribes," Yahiya said. "We have no idea if a person was killed in executions or personal vendettas.'"

The Baghdad morgue's acting director, Qais Hassan, said the morgue sent the Health Ministry daily figures broken down only by cause of death, without details about the kind of attack in which each person was killed. Hassan denied that any pressure had been placed on him to manipulate death tolls.

Hassan became acting morgue director after the previous director, Faik Bakir, left the country in recent months. International officials said he fled the country after receiving threats from both insurgents and pro-government forces over investigations of suspicious deaths. Bakir issued a statement over the weekend denying that, saying he had left the country on four months' approved medical leave.