Sawt Falasteen - More than 500 killed in Tanzania poll violence: govt

While President Samia Suluhu Hassan was declared to have won 98 percent of the vote in the October 29 election -- in which key opposition figures were barred from running -- the polls triggered days of protests around the country that were brutally suppressed by security forces.

Opposition and religious groups say thousands were killed by security forces, while Western diplomats have given estimates between 1,000 and 2,000.

Hassan sought to depict the protests as pre-planned and implied they were orchestrated by foreigners.

"The commission has told us that all the violence was planned, coordinated, financed and executed by people with training and equipment for committing crimes and destruction," she said after the report was presented.

She argued that Africa's internal wars were usually instigated by outsiders who want "to continue to plunder the resources".

The report was immediately dismissed by the opposition.

"It's all a cover-up actually. Like many other statements that the president has made, the report is all designed to whitewash the regime's crimes," John Kitoka, head of foreign affairs for the Chadema opposition party, told AFP by phone.

Mohamed Chande Othman, head of the commission set up by Hassan, said the toll of 518 was "not final and conclusive".

He rejected independent reports of mass graves and bodies being seized from hospital mortuaries, saying they "could not be substantiated".

It is the first government statement on casualty figures -- 2,390 were wounded, including 120 police officers -- but Othman did not state who was responsible.

"The images that widely circulated online, some of them were authentic, while others... had been manipulated, using AI," he said.

He also said some of those missing were "people who disappeared for romantic reasons and people who abducted themselves".

- Media blackout -

Foreign journalists were barred from entering the country to cover the election, and an internet blackout during and after the vote complicated efforts to gauge the scale of the violence.

But Hassan claimed reports on the unrest were false.

Hassan condemned "a lot of information distortion", saying that groups and individuals had reported statistics "exaggerating or the level of impact that took place" without verification.

The violence triggered rare criticism from African observers, with the African Union saying the election did not comply with "standards for democratic elections".

The Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), a UK-based independent digital investigation organisation, released a report in January that analysed images from the unrest and "verified the repeated use of live ammunition by security forces and plain-clothed armed men".

It "identified possible mass graves through satellite imagery and verified large piles of bodies" within user-generated content, as well as images showing civilians "assaulted" and "humiliated".

The report also provided a map of incidents where they had authenticated images of protesters "vandalising buildings, starting fires and throwing rocks at police officers".

The evidence also included verified footage of "the shooting of fleeing protesters, including a pregnant woman".

K.AbuDahab--SF-PST