Dozens of university students — most of them women — were slaughtered as they emerged from classes in a Shia district of Baghdad yesterday, in the bloodiest attack since Saddam Hussein’s execution.

Police said that at least 65 people were killed and 100 injured by two bombs designed to cause maximum damage when students left college for the day. The bodies of veiled women lay amid burning cars as emergency services tried to rescue the wounded.

Iraqi officals said that a car bomb exploded near the pick-up area as students boarded minivans at 3.45pm, with relatively few casualties. A suicide bomber waiting at a different exit gate then inflicted a much greater toll as people fled in panic from the first explosion.

It was the worst attack on a day in which more than 100 were killed. The United Nations released a report yesterday saying that 34,452 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2006, three times more than the official Iraqi Government figures.

The university attack is thought to be the work of Sunni extremists. It came amid widespread Sunni fury over the botched executions of Saddam Hussein, his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Baathist judge Awar al-Bandar. The insurgents are also expected to try to derail a planned US and Iraqi Government crackdown on violence in Baghdad.

The latest attack was in Mustansiriya, a predominantly Shia university near the Sadr City stronghold of the radical cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr. His militia has been active in the neighbourhood in recent months, intimidating Sunnis.

Less than an hour after the university attack gunmen in a minivan and on two motorcycles opened fire on an outdoor market in another Shia neighborhood near by.

Interior Ministry officials said that at least 25 people were killed by four other bombs around the city yesterday, including a twin attack which killed 15 people and wounded 70 near a Sunni mosque in central Baghdad. Earlier ten people were killed by a drive-by shooting in Binoog, near Mustansiriya, and two bombings killed ten people in central Baghdad and Sadr City.

The UN figures, which suggest that 94 Iraqis are killed each day, are drawn from data collected by the Iraqi Health Ministry and Baghdad mortuary. The UN report also says that 470,000 Iraqis have been driven from their homes. Gianni Magazzeni, the head of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq in Baghdad, urged Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, to intensify efforts to restore law and order. “

Without significant progress in the rule of law sectarian violence will continue indefinitely and eventually spiral out of control,” he said.

“Law-enforcement agencies do not provide effective protection to the population of Iraq.”

The UN statistics contrast sharply with Iraqi government figures in early January of a death toll of 12,357 last year from terrorist violence, which excluded many deaths classed as criminal. The Government has challenged previous UN statistics as exaggerated.

The Baghdad mortuary disclosed this month, however, that it received 16,000 unidentified bodies last year. It estimated that 80 to 85 per cent of them were victims of violence.

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