Baghdad bombs kill 105

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Bombers killed 70 people, many of them young women students, at a Baghdad university on Tuesday, one of the city's bloodiest days in weeks.

In all, at least 105 were killed in bombings and a shooting in the capital on a day when the United Nations said more than 34,000 Iraqi civilians died in violence last year. Four U.S. soldiers were killed in a bomb attack in northern Iraq.

The Shi'ite prime minister blamed the latest bloodshed in Baghdad on followers of Saddam Hussein. His fellow Sunni Arabs are angry at the botched execution of two aides on Monday, two weeks after the ousted leader was himself hanged to sectarian taunts from official observers, captured on an illicit video.

In Washington, President Bush said the Iraqi government had "fumbled" Saddam's execution by making it look like a revenge killing.

Saying he had expressed disappointment to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Bush told PBS television: "I was pleased with the trials they got. I was disappointed and felt like they (Iraqi officials) fumbled the -- particularly the Saddam Hussein -- execution."

Outside the Mustansiriya University in central Baghdad, a car bomb tore through students, most of them women, gathered

waiting for vehicles to take them home. A suicide bomber then walked into a crowd at a rear entrance, killing more.

"The followers of the ousted regime have been dealt a blow and their dreams buried forever," Maliki said in a statement. "So Saddamists and terrorists now target the world of knowledge and committed this act today against the innocent students of Mustansiriya University."

The Education Ministry, whose employees and students have been frequent targets of what the United Nations report called Islamic extremists, issued a public appeal for blood for the 110 wounded and said the university would close until next week.

The bombings bore the marks of Sunni Arab insurgents. Many Sunnis were outraged by the latest hanging following a trial for crimes against humanity, and they saw the decapitation of Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti by the noose as an act of revenge, not the mishap the Shi'ite-led government said it was.

34,000 DEAD

The United Nations, in its latest two-monthly human rights report on Iraq, said data from hospitals and morgues put the total civilian death toll for 2006 at 34,452 -- 94 each day.