Are high-pt pions suppressed in Pb+Pb collisions at root (sNN) = 17.3 GeV?

Transverse momentum spectra of neutral pions in the range 0.7 < PT < 3.2 GeV/c have been measured at 2.3 ≤ η lab ≤ 3.0 by the WA98 experiment in p+C and p+Pb collisions at √SNN = 17.3 GeV. Scaled by the number of nucleon-nucleon collisions (N coll ), the π 0 yields in p+C and p+Pb at PT ≈ 2.0 - 2.5 GeV/c are higher than the respective yields in central Pb+Pb collisions with N part ≥ 300. This observation is qualitatively consistent with expectations from parton energy loss.