UNITED NATIONS, April 25: A United Nations report revealed on Wednesday that the Iraqi government held recent casualty figures from the United Nations, fearing they would be used to present a grim picture which would undermine the coalition’s security efforts.

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

It also was the first time the UN has issued a quarterly report, previously offering bimonthly assessments, in a bid to enable it to focus more on specific themes like child abuse and detention centers.

The latest report raised fears that arrested Iraqis were facing prolonged detentions while often facing insufficient evidence.

“The continuing failure to take decisive action in this regard can only serve to encourage the climate of impunity that prevails today, undermining the government’s own efforts to restore law and order and ensure respect for the rule of law,” the report said.

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 often were randomly taken into custody, with more than 3,000 people in detention by the end of March.

For the first time, the 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 announced in a statement its deep reservations about the report that is “inaccurate in presenting information” and that “lacks credibility in many of its points. Also, it lacks balance in presenting the situation of the human rights situation in Iraq.”

“The publication of this unbalanced report ... puts the credibility of the UN office in Iraq on stake and it aggravates the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, instead of solving it,” the statement said.

UN human rights officer Ivana Vuco said the government did not officially give 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.