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Google Earth, the search engine’s online mapping service, has updated its images of the Darfur region in Sudan in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of people living there.

In partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Google has published new, high-resolution aerial photographs of the area, showing destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps. In some places, the resolution is high enough to show the burnt ruins of individual houses.

President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has denied that widespread atrocities have occurred in Darfur, but the United Nations estimates that more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in four years.

Google has studded maps of the area with icons representing refugee camps with tents and destroyed villages with flames. Each icon links to a window that gives the village’s name and information about the extent of its destruction.

The maps include a link to a presentation by the Holocaust Memorial Museum on the crisis in the region, with photos, video, historical background and testimony. Sara Bloomfield, the museum’s director, said the museum had approached Google about the project as they sought ways to highlight what they believe is genocide.

Speaking at the launch of the project, Daowd Salih, a native of Darfur and a former officer for the German Red Cross, said he hoped that Google Earth would help document the crisis for millions of users. "We need President Bashir and other perpetrators to know they are being watched,” he said

Some analysts have suggested that Google’s decision to become involved marks a step away from its stated aim of cataloguing and organising information.

“It raises the question of what their responsibility is to decide what to cover,” Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said. “This mirrors the type of things that news organisations deal with: deciding how much resources to spend on an issue and what you cover.”

Google was recently criticised for replacing post-Hurricane Katrina imagery on its map portal with views of the city from before the storm. The company said its use of the pre-Katrina imagery occurred as part of routine enhancements and denied that the move involved political considerations, but it replaced the later images in response to the criticism.