Baghdad, Iraq ? The man in charge of Iraq’s police and security services on Thursday dismissed accusations that Sunni Arab clerics are being assassinated by a Shiite militia in which he played a leading role.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said in an interview that more mosques and clerics from the Shiite majority had been attacked than those belonging to the Sunni minority.

Jabr is a top member of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country’s largest Shiite Muslim party, and he served as a senior official in the party’s militia, the Badr Brigade, before joining Iraq’s first postwar Cabinet in 2003.

Asked about allegations against the brigade made by Sunni Arab clerics and repeated by lay Sunnis, Jabr said a police inquiry had produced nothing to suggest the Shiite militia was involved in killing clerics.

Rather, he said, militants captured by security forces have confessed to killing clerics from both sides in an effort to provoke sectarian strife.

Jabr said statistics he received from an Interior Ministry research center indicated more than 80 percent of the approximately 12,000 Iraqi civilians killed in the past 18 months were Shiites.

He acknowledged his findings weren’t precise, however. He said he figured the totals for Shiites and Sunnis by looking at which group was dominant in the areas where victims lived rather than having a religious identification for each individual.