The Iraqi government has told medical authorities not to reveal to the United Nations the true extent of civilian casualties in the country's conflict, French newspaper Le Monde said on Friday.
The daily quoted a telegram sent by the head of the UN mission in Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, to headquarters in New York, in which he said: "This development risks damaging the capacity of the UN's Assistance Mission to report the number of civilians killed or injured."
Since July 2005 the UN has used data provided by Baghdad's Forensic Institute and the Iraqi health ministry to form an estimate. The estimate "was certainly imperfect but an indicator nonetheless of the growing number of civilian victims", the telegram said.
The latest report said that 3,590 civilians died a violent death in July and 3,009 in August, figures which it said were "unprecedented".
But the telegram quoted by Le Monde said that on September 21, one day after publication of the report, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki wrote to the health ministry with instructions not to disclose more figures.
In an investigation published in British medical weekly The Lancet earlier this month, US and Iraq specialists estimated that more than 600,000 civilians died a violent death between March 2003 and July 2006.
US President George W. Bush questioned the investigation's findings.