Last week the French newspaper Le Monde first reported that an unofficial and unverified UN tally for civilian deaths in the final months of the government's siege against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) exceeded 20,000.

The British newspaper The Times later reported the same figure, writing in an editorial that 'the UN has no right to collude in suppressing the appalling evidence' of a government-executed massacre of civilians in northeastern Sri Lanka.

Mr Ban vehemently rejected the notion that the world body had been involved in a cover-up.

Last week UN humanitarian affairs chief John Holmes disputed the 20,000 figure, saying it was based on questionable assumptions and that the final death toll may never be known.

So far the United Nations has no plans for an investigation of the Sri Lanka war. The UN Human Rights Council last month decided not to have any probe of possible war crimes committed during the months-long siege against the LTTE zone.

In the final months of the war, the civilian death rate rose alarmingly as government forces surrounded the LTTE, who retreated to a tiny strip of coast in northeastern Sri Lanka, where the United Nations says they kept hundreds of thousands of civilians as human shields.

During that siege, Mr Holmes repeatedly criticised the government for shelling areas where civilians were trapped, warning that it could lead to a 'bloodbath'. He also criticized the LTTE for treating innocent civilians as hostages. Both sides rejected the UN charges.

Mr Holmes said the initial figure of 7,000 deaths had been deemed far too questionable for official publication because the world body was not in a position to calculate a reliable death count. It was not really present in the battle zone, he said.

The United Nations believes that anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 people died in what was one of Asia's longest modern wars, erupting in earnest in 1983 when the LTTE began to fight for a separate state for Sri Lanka's minority Tamils. -- REUTERS