By Claudia Parsons, BAGHDAD, Reuters
Other bombings and a mass shooting brought to at least 95 the death toll in Baghdad on the bloodiest day for such attacks in weeks, as the United Nations published figures showing more than 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in violence last year.
The latest attacks followed the hangings on Monday of two aides to Saddam Hussein, which angered minority Sunni Arabs and fuelled sectarian tension.
The Shiite led government plans a security crackdown backed by U.S. reinforcements and billed as a "last chance" for Iraq to pull back from a sectarian civil war between Sunni rebels and Shiite militias that would drag in millions of armed civilians.
A police source said a car bomb exploded near the main gate of the Mustansiriya University in an area where students, many of them women, wait for minibuses and cars to pick them up to go home. A suicide bomber on foot then blew himself up near a second gate to the campus as people fled the first explosion.
"The majority of those killed are female students who were on their way home," a university official said as rescue crews picked through smouldering wreckage and human remains.
Unveiling its latest human rights report on Tuesday, the United Nations chided the government for allowing killers, some of them inside the security forces, to go unpunished.
"Without significant progress on the rule of law, sectarian violence will continue indefinitely and eventually spiral out of control," the U.N. human rights chief in Baghdad, Gianni Magazzeni, told a news conference.
Magazzeni said 34,452 civilians were killed and more than 36,000 wounded in 2006. He accused the government of failing to provide security and blamed some of the violence on militias colluding with or working inside the police and army.
There was no comparable figure for 2005.
"The root causes of the sectarian violence lie in revenge killings and lack of accountability for past crimes as well as in the growing sense of impunity for on going human rights violations," the U.N.'s latest report on Iraq said.
The casualty figures are much higher than statistics issued by Iraqi government officials. The government itself branded the United Nations' last two-monthly report in November grossly exaggerated and banned its civil servants from releasing data.
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