U.S. Lowers Estimate of Civilian Casualties to 202, Plans to Release 100 POWs

The U.S. Southern Command on Friday lowered its estimate of civilians killed and weapons seized in last month’s invasion and said it plans to release about 100 prisoners of war.

Southern Command spokesman Capt. Mitchell Toms said that only 202 civilians were killed, not 220 as reported earlier this week. The figure was revised by the Southern Command after it determined that 18 of the 220 were armed combatants who died during the Dec. 20 U.S. invasion, Toms said.

The new number coincides with the figure released Tuesday by Panama’s Institute of Legal Medicine, the official reporting authority for violent and suspicious deaths.

Toms said the revised number was due to further identification checks among the dead, and that the 18 were determined to have been either members of the Panama Defense Forces or Dignity Battalions, the paramilitary groups loyal to ousted strongman Manuel A. Noriega.

“They (the Southern Command) must have determined that by identification,” Toms said.

The number of civilians killed during the invasion has been a source of controversy. Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark charged last week that there was a “conspiracy of silence” over the number of civilians killed and said that several thousand Panamanian civilians may have died.

Since the invasion, the Southern Command has reported conflicting figures on civilian dead, ranging from 83 to more than 250.

Also Friday, the Southern Command lowered its estimate of weapons captured from the PDF and Dignity Battalions from about 76,000 to 52,000. Toms said mistakes were made when the weapons were being counted.