MANILA (AFP) -- A UN human rights investigator met Philippine police officials on Tuesday amid mounting international concern over the hundreds of political murders here since President Gloria Arroyo came to power.

Arroyo is under pressure from Western governments as well as the Vatican to stop the bloodshed, which has seen more than 800 rights workers, union leaders and judges assassinated, according to local rights monitors.

Most of the victims have been leftists, and some were accused by the military of having links to the Communist guerrillas who have been waging an insurgency against the government for nearly four decades.

Philip Alston, the Australian investigator, met the second-highest ranking police officer in the Philippines, Avelino Razon, who pledged full cooperation with the inquiry.

The police said Razon had given the investigator a list of 1,334 government officials killed by the Communist guerrillas -- and said some of the alleged political victims were actually guerrillas killed by security forces.

In a statement, it said Alston also met with Renato Bugtong and Edwin Mascarinas, members of small leftist political parties who it said had earlier been reported murdered but turned out to be alive.

Razon said the case bolstered police suspicions that the leftists "had been bloating their figures of alleged victims of political violence" without citing the official count of victims of political murders.

The United Nations has indicated that Alston will not speak to reporters until the end of his visit next week.

Arroyo received a report on the political killings last month from an independent commission headed by a former Supreme Court justice.

Those who have read the report, which has not been made public, say it blamed certain members of the country's armed forces, as well as Communist guerrillas and warlords, for some of the killings.

The guerrilla movement, which has an estimated 7,000 fighters, survives mainly through the extortion of businesses and local politicians as well as from the support of tiny far-left parties in western Europe.

Arroyo suspended peace talks with the exiled leadership of the group in 2003, saying she had concluded that they were not interested in reaching a political settlement to the insurgency, which began in 1969.