TITANYEN, Haiti — Wildly conflicting death tolls from Haitian officials have raised suspicions that no one really knows how many people died in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The only thing that seems certain is the death toll is one of the highest in a modern disaster.

A day after Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue raised the official death toll to 230,000, her office put out a statement Wednesday quoting President Rene Preval as saying 270,000 bodies had been hastily buried by the government following the earthquake.

A press officer withdrew the statement, saying there was an error, but then reissued it within minutes. Later Wednesday, the ministry said there was a typo in the figure — the number should have read 170,000.

Even that didn't clear things up. In the late afternoon, Preval and Lassegue appeared together at the government's temporary headquarters.

Preval, speaking English, told journalists there were 170,000 dead, apparently referring to the number of bodies contained in mass graves.

Lassegue interrupted him in French, giving a number lower than she had given the previous day: "No, no, the official number is 210,000."