Rights Group: Russia Inflating Casualty Figures

Deliberate attempts by the Russian government to exaggerate the number of people killed in the South Ossetia conflict are provoking revenge attacks on Georgian villagers in the republic, a human rights group claimed yesterday.

Anna Neistat of Human Rights Watch, who is leading a team investigating the damage in South Ossetia, told the Guardian that Russian estimates of 2,000 dead were "suspicious".

"Our findings so far do not in any way confirm the Russian statistics." she said. "On the contrary, they suggest the numbers are exaggerated."

Neistat said that HRW investigators had on Tuesday and Wednesday recorded cases of Ossetian fighters burning and looting Georgian villages north of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.

"The torching of houses in these villages is in some ways a result of the massive Russia propaganda machine which constantly repeats claims of genocide and exaggerates the casualties," she said. "That is then used to justify retribution."

Neistat said doctors at Tskhinvali hospital gave figures that 273 wounded had been treated there and 44 dead had been brought to the city morgue. "By day five of a conflict one expects that there is some kind of list of the dead and injured. But here there is no information. Nothing."