Wikipedia quotes Stephen E. Ambrose as saying that Other Losses is "... spectacularly flawed ..." without saying that Ambrose also wrote that "You have made a major historical discovery which will ... span the oceans and have reverberations for decades, yea centuries to come. You have the goods on these guys ..."

Wikipedia does not say that Ambrose changed his mind only after he was retained by the US Army to lecture at the War College in Pennsylvania. Nor does Wikipedia mention that in his attack on me in the New York Times, he admitted that he had not done the necessary research to reach the conclusions that he published in that same article. Wikipedia fails to mention that the Ambrose it cites as an authority admitted that he had plagiarized several other authors. Wikipedia does not concern itself with the accusations that Ambrose stole work from a graduate student which he published as his own.

Wikipedia ignores my book, Crimes and Mercies, which goes far towards balancing the record of western actions after World War Two. The book shows the great charity extended by the western allies, chiefly Canada and the USA, towards the starving around the world after WW2, including the Japanese and Germans. Saying that the overwhelming majority of professional historians reject my work, and citing as an authority one historian who has never worked in this field, Wikipedia ignores the support given me by the eminent US Army military historian Col. Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, a former Senior Historian of the US Army Center for Military History, Washington. Fisher, a professional historian for decades, wrote the official US Army history of the campaign in Italy. He assisted me for months in researching documents in the US National Archives, wrote the Introduction to my book Other Losses, and has supported me with public statements for the seventeen years since its first publication. He helped me for many months researching in the archives.

Wikipedia does not mention the expert editing, research help and public support given me by the eminent epidemiologist and biostatistician, Dr Anthony B. Miller, former head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Toronto.

Wikipedia also casts aside the support given my work by Richard Overy, King's College, University of London; Otto Kimminich, University of Regensburg; Dr Alfred De Zayas, author of many books on postwar German history; Prof. Dr. Peter Hoffmann, McGill University, author of the most expert books on the German resistance; Prof. J. K. Johnson, Carleton University, Ottawa; Professor Ralph Raico, University of Buffalo; Prof. Ed Peterson, University of Wisconsin; Prof Ralph Scott, University of Iowa; Prof. Pierre Van Den Berghe, University of Seattle; Prof. Dr Richard Mueller, former head, Department of English, University of Aachen; Prof. Hans Koch, University of York and many others.

Among writers who have approved my work and supported me are Julian Barnes; Nikolai Tolstoy; John Fraser, Master of Massey College, Toronto; John Bemrose of Toronto; Robert Kroetsch, Winnipeg; and many others. My work has been published around in the world in ten languages by Macmillan, Little, Brown, Prima, Ullstein, Editions Sand, McClelland and Stewart, New Press, and many many others.

Finally, the most glaring omission is that the massive and detailed KGB Archives in Moscow have millions of documents whose evidence completely confirms the statistical work in Other Losses. The math is simple: about 1.5 million German prisoners alive in allied prison camps at the end of the war never came home, nor were their deaths reported to the German government, their families, the International Red Cross or the UN. The figure was determined by the Adenauer government in Germany, submitted to the UN, and has never been disputed by anyone. Thus when Other Losses came out in 1989, alleging deaths of about one million in French and American camps, that left about 500,000 to be accounted for. They could have died only in the KGB camps, because there were not half a million prisoners in any other camps in the world. Thus, in effect Other Losses was predicting that when the communists opened the KGB archives, they would show deaths of about 500,000. And lo and behold, when Gorbachev brought down the communist rule, and the archives were opened, I went there, and found the Bulanov Report which showed that 356,687 Germans died in Soviet captivity, plus another 93,900 civilians taken as substitutes for dead or escaped prisoners for a total of 450,587.

This astonishing discovery is not mentioned in Wikipedia, nor by any other of the "professional historians." Except one, Stefan Karner, who went to the KGB archives, saw the evidence piled up in enormous quantities, and said he did not believe it. Instead, he preferred to publish his own "estimates," which confirm the conventional view.

In July, which saw the worst sectarian slaughter so far in Baghdad, Sudani collected up to 500 bodies in a single week. There was one particularly dreadful day when he wondered how he would find the strength to carry on.

Arriving at al-Tub al-Adli morgue in the capital, he was asked to remove a coarse cloth sack of heads that had been left on a filthy floor. Among the heads was that of a boy no more than 12 years old. Sudani could see that it had been cut off.

"I felt something snap inside me," he said last week. "My guts were knotted and I started to cry. It was like looking at my young son. He had such an innocent face."

Yet Sudani, a father of three boys - Khaled, 18, Hassanein, 16, and Jaafar, 7 - recovered his composure, reflected on his duty to the dead and returned to his macabre routine.

The sheikh ensures that each of Baghdad's unclaimed bodies is wrapped in six metres of blue plastic and loaded onto a flat-bed lorry for the journey south.

The route is perilous for the drivers of his truck and three escort vehicles. They are Shi'ites but must pass through the so-called "Triangle of Death", the heartland of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and associated Sunni extremists.

"Every time we do the trip we feel that an invisible hand is guiding us," Sudani said. "It is the divine presence of Allah's angels that sees us safely through."

The convoy's destination is usually the holy city of Najaf and the Wadi al-Salam (valley of peace) cemetery. One of the largest graveyards on earth, it is said to have been designated a gateway to paradise by Imam Ali, one of Shi'ite Islam's most revered figures.

Here, within sight of the gilded Imam Ali mosque, the sheikh and a team of helpers wearing white gloves and masks unload the bodies, remove the plastic wrapping and cut the bonds of any whose hands were tied before they were killed.

They wash and disinfect the bodies, then assign a number to each one. Every tormented face is photographed and any distinguishing features are meticulously recorded on a computer in case a loved one should summon the courage to come looking for them.

The bodies are then shrouded in 10 metres of white cotton, carried to the graveside and lain in line to await burial.

The diggers toil relentlessly to prepare for at least two deliveries a week from the sheikh, who brings scores of bodies each time. First a shallow, sloping trench is carved out of the desert soil, then individual holes are dug.

In theory, each hole should be as deep as the digger is tall. But if pressure of numbers makes this impossible, care is taken to ensure that the graves are at least deep enough to keep out wild dogs.

The bodies are heaped in and covered with the mushroom-coloured sand of the desert. In the absence of names, their numbers are marked on a concrete block at the side of the pit and prayers are recited to complete the ceremony.

Mass graves in Iraq have long been associated with Saddam's cruellest campaigns of persecution, from Operation Anfal against the northern Kurds in 1988 - for which the former dictator is now on trial, accused of genocide - to the suppression of an uprising by southern Shi'ites in 1991.

When coalition forces invading three years ago found no weapons of mass destruction, Tony Blair said he hoped that the discovery of such graves would persuade those who doubted the wisdom of removing Saddam "just how brutal, tyrannical and appalling that regime was and what a blessing it is for the Iraqi people and for humankind that he has gone from power".

The mass graves of the post-war period in Najaf and the neighbouring holy city of Karbala are filled by Sudani and others with a care that Saddam's henchmen never showed. Yet they signify atrocities as horrifying as almost anything seen in the pre-war Iraq.

"It is as if Saddam had never left," Sudani said. "In his day people were callously murdered and those I have to pick up from the morgue today are no different. I believe the people carrying out these murders learnt from Saddam. He was the master. But the killers have developed new methods more brutal than before."

The victims of Sunni beheading gangs and the Shi'ite death squads' so-called "driller killers" are piling up at an increasingly alarming rate amid claims that Iraq is entering a civil war.

"How could humans reach this level of violence? What drove them to such a level of inhumanity?" said the sheikh, reflecting the despair of millions clinging precariously to life in cities blighted by terror. "How have we reached the stage where we have hundreds of unclaimed bodies every week?"

Part of the answer lies in the records he has amassed over the years. The strange personal archive maintained by Sudani and his son Khaled at their modest home in the poor Baghdad suburb of Sadr City chronicles each change in the pattern of violence and its devastating impact.

The files created for each month show how the Sunni beheaders held sway when their stronghold of Falluja was stormed by US forces in 2004; how Shi'ite squads armed with electric drills stepped up their activities after an attack on the al-Askari mosque in Samarra last February; and how little difference the killing in June of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, has made to the level of violence.

According to health ministry figures, 3,438 civilians were killed in Iraq in July alone, nearly double the figure for January. A much-heralded security plan for Baghdad, under which US and Iraqi forces aim to secure the city, one area at a time, is cutting the number of murders in some parts of the city but August figures showed the overall toll down by only 17%.

Looking at Sudani's computer records is like peering into a chamber of horrors. A photograph of each corpse he has catalogued glares out from the screen. The sheikh may know nothing about how they led their lives but he possesses intimate knowledge of how they died.

Some of those who were burnt were killed in car bombs, he explains, while others were dowsed with petrol and set alight. Of those who died from asphyxiation, some were strangled and others were suffocated with polythene bags.

"Sometimes people can't believe what they see in these pictures," he said. "Many can't stomach them but I have to live with them, be with them and try to make sense out of them.

"I am very tired but this has become my destiny, my mission. I do not do this out of choice but out of religious obligation."

It was while I was working on an investigation to expose Iraq's new mass graves two months ago that I was warned of a plan to kill me. This newspaper's emergency evacuation procedure swung into action and I had no choice but to abandon my inquiries for the time being. But Sudani's haunting images made me determined that the story should be told.

The sensitive and hazardous nature of Sudani's work has attracted unwelcome attention to him, too. A roadside bomb was recently detonated as his convoy drove through the town of Latifiya in the Triangle of Death. Seven of his men were injured in the attack, which he says was aimed at him.

"The only reason no one was killed was that the vehicles were driving in the middle of the road rather than at the side," he said.

Several death threats have followed in text messages warning him to stop what he is doing or face the consequences. "Leave your job, curtail your movement, we shall kill you very soon," said one text.

He believes his association with the Mahdi army of Moqtadr al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite cleric, has helped to make him the target of Sunni extremists.

One factor in his decision to ignore the warnings is the satisfaction he senses when a family traces a missing relative through his archive and discovers that he has provided dignified burial.

Often the families are Sunnis who did not collect a body for fear of being kidnapped or killed by Shi'ite militiamen said to watch the morgue. Those who prefer a Sunni burial ground are allowed to exhume the dead.

Sudani makes no religious distinction between those he helps: "The unclaimed victims have no mothers or fathers to cry for them so my men and I become their loved ones and we mourn them as our own."

NHS regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, said it had alerted 20 NHS trusts.

Late last year, the US Food and Drug Administration ordered a recall of the potentially tainted products and warned that many patients could have been exposed to HIV and other diseases, but insisted the risk of infection was minimal.

New York investigators say death certificates were doctored to make the dead out to have been younger and healthier than they actually were.

The tissue, in the form of skin, bone and tendons, was later sold for use in procedures like dental implants and hip replacements.

Four people have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The body of veteran BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who died of cancer aged 95 in March 2004, was reported to have been caught up in the case.

Infected

A spokeswoman for the MHRA said: "It's not to say that the 77 body parts that were brought in came from stolen cadavers or were infected.

"But they did come from Biomedical Tissue Services and we alerted hospitals of this earlier in the year."

She added it was up to individual doctors to decide what to do in regards to removing the implants or deciding it was less risk to leave them in.

The body parts were all pieces of bone which were grafted on to patients needing hip or jaw operations.

The MHRA would not say exactly where in the UK the imported parts were sent because the procedures were unusual enough that the patients involved could be identified.

And the spokeswoman added: "We would say any risk is minimum and this is just a precautionary measure."