Of those, 40 suffered life-threatening injuries, Reid said as he toured a military rehabilitation centre for the British armed forces in Epsom, southeast England.

Until now, London has only confirmed that 98 of its servicemen and women have died in Iraq, two-thirds of whom are thought to have died in enemy action.

The government has been accused in some quarters of a cover-up because of the lack of any definitive, publicly-available casualty figure.

But Reid rebutted the claims, saying that categorising the injured, wounded and sick was not a priority for forces in Iraq.

"The important thing, actually, is not the 40 or the 230, the important thing is that every single one of them gets to be given the care they need," he said. "Facilities like this give them that."

A Ministry of Defence spokesman explained later that about 4,000 British personnel had been "medevac-ed" from Iraq to Britain for treatment; the majority were due to illness or "non-battle injuries".

The 230 were classified as "wounded in action". Not all were brought back to Britain. Some received treatment at the British base in Shaibah, south of the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

The 40 were listed as being "VSI" -- or "very seriously injured" -- and required emergency treatment for life-threatening wounds, the spokesman told AFP.

He said officials had spent the last three weeks collating information, putting the discrepancies in previous reports of injury figures down to different recording methods and terminology.

Britain currently has about 8,000 troops in Iraq's four southern states.

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