At least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the allied invasion of Iraq in March last year, according to a study by public health experts published today.

The risk of dying prematurely has risen by 250 per cent for ordinary Iraqi people since Saddam Hussein was toppled, the US and Iraqi scientists estimate, while the risk of dying violently is 58 times higher.

Most of the victims of violence are women and children killed by allied airstrikes, said the online report in the Lancet medical journal. It called for changes in coalition military tactics to cut the death toll.

The study found that the most lethal area of the country was around the city of Fallujah, where two thirds of the violent deaths were estimated to have occurred.

American troops besieged Fallujah for six weeks in April, and have continued to bombard the city from the air, saying it is the base of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The US Army is expected to launch another attack on Fallujah after the US election. British troops from the Black Watch are currently deploying south of Baghdad to free US marines for another assault on the city, which has been encircled for two weeks.

When the violent civilian deaths in Fallujah were taken out of the equation, the risk of dying had risen by 150 per cent in Iraq as a whole, the academics found.

Before the invasion, the major causes of death in Iraq were heart attack, stroke and chronic illness.

A team of American and Iraqi researchers carried out the study last month by surveying clusters of households. They compared civilian mortality during the 14.6 months before the invasion with the 17.8 month period after it.

The researchers, led by Dr Les Roberts from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, conducted interviews with 988 households from 33 randomly selected neighbourhoods, recording the place and manner of each violent death reported.

Dr Roberts said: "Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. We have shown that the collection of public health information is possible even during periods of extreme violence.

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