Italian prosecutors have alleged that a high-ranking World Health Organization (WHO) official lied to them about a spiked WHO report into Italy’s coronavirus response, the Associated Press reported Friday. They also revealed private communications Friday with potential to embarrass the United Nations health agency.

This follows the international scrutiny the WHO received for its report investigating the origins of COVID-19 inside China, whose authoritarian government was accused, among other things, of not providing full enough access to data for the WHO-led team of experts.

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Prosecutors in the northern city of Bergamo placed Dr. Ranieri Guerra under investigation for allegedly making false statements to them when he was questioned in November, at the time serving as the WHO’s assistant director-general, according to the news outlet. Guerra was the U.N. agency’s intermediary with the Italian government after the country early last year became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe.

Prosecutors are looking into the massive COVID-19 death toll in Bergamo and whether the country’s unpreparedness entering the pandemic was a factor, according to the AP. Their investigation expanded to include the spiked WHO report into Italy’s COVID-19 response, which revealed that the Italian government hadn’t updated its pandemic preparedness plan since 2006. Guerra was a high-ranking Italian health ministry official during 2014 to 2017, when the plan should have been updated to comply with E.U. directives.

On May 14, the day after the report was published, the WHO removed it from its website and never reuploaded it, according to the AP. The report’s disappearance, the news outlet noted, suggested that the agency removed it to spare the Italian government criticism, embarrassment, and liability.

When asked at the time whether Guerra or the Italian government had intervened to spike the report, the WHO said it was taken down by its regional office in Copenhagen due to “factual inaccuracies,” according to the AP.

However, documentation gathered by the prosecutors—initially reported by the state-run RAI Report—indicated that Guerra maneuvered to have the report removed because the Italian government was upset with it, per the AP.

In one of the private WhatsApp chats between Guerra and Dr. Silvio Brusaferro included in the documentation, Guerra wrote on May 14, 2020 to the high-ranking Italian public health official: “In the end I went to Tedros and got the document removed,” referencing WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

According to the AP, the WHO press office—in an email to the news outlet on Friday—denied that Tedros was involved in spiking the report and insisted the decision-making about the report was done by the Copenhagen office.

“The Director-General was not involved himself in the development, publishing or withdrawal of the report,” the email reportedly said, reiterating that it was taken down because it “contained inaccuracies and inconsistencies” and had been published prematurely. Guerra, the email added, was no longer an assistant director-general but rather a “special adviser.”

Read the full original Associated Press report, here, to learn more about the story.

You can follow Douglas Braff on Twitter @DouglasPBraff.