More than 60 civilians were killed in two bomb blasts outside a university in Baghdad on Tuesday, the most violent day in more than a month in Iraq, as the wave of violence continued to rock the lawless capital of a fallen nation.

Thousands of miles away, in New York City, a report by the United Nations said the death toll in Iraq touched 34,452 in 2006. The final figure could be higher, since the casualty figures for December 2006 from various provinces have not been included in this figure. The report, released by Gianni Magazzeni, chief of UN assistance mission for Iraq in Baghdad, added that 36,685 were wounded in 2006. Some 30,842 people were detained through the year.

The tally was the first official attempt at counting the dead in Iraq, and was compiled using reports from information from hospitals, the Iraqi health ministry and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad, Magazzeni said. The Iraqi government has contested the figures, but the UN has stuck to its figure saying that it relied only on official sources.

The mounting death toll points to the lack of security, something US President George Bush's new strategy promises to provide.

The toll reported by the UN is more than 10-fold the number of American casualties in four years of war in Iraq.

Half the deaths occurred in Baghdad, the UN report points out, and a majority of them from gunshot wounds, execution style. October was the most violent in 2006. The main cause of the death toll was Sunni-Shia violence, which was sparked off after a bombing of a Shia mosque in Samarra last year.

The UN report said the violence has torn asunder families, disrupted education by forcing schools and colleges to shut down, and sent professionals fleeing from the country.

Photograph: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images