Comment on "Experimental realization of a three-qubit entangled W state"

Recently Eibl et al. [PRL 92, 077901 (2004)] reported the experimental observation of the three-photon polarization-entangled W state. In this Comment we point out that, actually, the particular measurements involved in the experiment testing Mermin's inequality cannot be used for the verification of the existence of genuinely quantal tripartite correlations in the observed state, and therefore this state cannot conclusively be identified with the W state.