UN rights office says it can no longer update Syria death toll because of lack of access

GENEVA – GENEVA — The U.N.'s human rights office says it has stopped updating the death toll from Syria's civil war since its last count of at least 100,000 in late July.

Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, blamed the failure to provide new figures on the organization's own lack of access on the ground in Syria and its inability to verify "source material" from others.

Colville told reporters Tuesday in Geneva that the total number of dead the U.N. had estimated was based on an exhaustive effort to verify a combination of six different figures supplied by a variety of sources and "for the time being we're not updating those figures."