Deliberate attempts by the Russian government to exaggerate the number of people killed in the South Ossetia conflict are provoking revenge attacks on Georgian villagers in the breakaway republic, a respected human rights group claimed today.

Anna Neistat of Human Rights Watch (HRW), who is leading a team investigating the humanitarian damage in South Ossetia, told the Guardian that Russian estimates of 2,000 dead in the conflict were "suspicious".

"The figure of 2,000 people killed is very doubtful," she said. "Our findings so far do not in any way confirm the Russian statistics. On the contrary, they suggest the numbers are exaggerated."

Neistat said that HRW investigators had, today and yesterday, recorded cases of Ossetian fighters burning and looting Georgian villages north of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.

"The torching of houses in these villages is in some ways a result of the massive Russia propaganda machine which constantly repeats claims of genocide and exaggerates the scale of casualties," she said. "That is then used to justify retribution."

Neistat said that doctors at Tskhinvali hospital had provided figures that 273 wounded people had been treated there during the conflict and a total of 44 dead people had been brought to the city morgue. Russian and South Ossetian officials have claimed that 1,400 people were killed in the first day of fighting, mostly in Tskhinvali.

There have been reports of Ossetians burying relatives in their allotments and there are no lists of the casualties. Neistat stressed that HRW's investigation was not complete but she added: "By day five of a conflict one normally expects that there is some kind of list of the dead and injured, or at least an indication of their age and gender. But here there is no information. Absolutely nothing."