Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Some 151,000 Iraqis died violently in the three years after the March 2003 invasion of the country, the World Health Organization said in a report.

In the first year, 128 Iraqis died from violent causes on an average day, according to the report based on research by the WHO and Iraq's government. In the second year, the daily toll dropped to 115, and then rose to 126 in the third year, the WHO said in a release issued on embargo late yesterday. The report by the WHO, a United Nations agency in Geneva, covers the period between the U.S.-led invasion and June 2006.

Compiling the information had been ``very difficult,'' Naeema Al-Gasseer, the WHO representative to Iraq, said in a statement accompanying the report. ``There have been roadblocks, curfews, suspicions among the populations about the interviewers, and one interviewer was kidnapped.''

The WHO said the figures were three times higher than those from the Iraq Body Count, a group that compiles death tolls, which reported on its Web site that 47,668 Iraqi civilians died in the same period.

Violence became a leading cause of death for Iraqi adults after the invasion, according to the WHO-Iraqi government survey, which was based on interviews conducted in 9,345 households and almost 1,000 neighborhoods and villages across Iraq. More than 50 percent of violent deaths took place in Baghdad.

Suicide Attacks

Iraqi civilians have faced sectarian suicide attacks, shootings and abductions as well as being caught up in the crossfire between U.S.-led forces and insurgents. One of the deadliest suicide attacks took place on March 2, 2004, when almost-simultaneous suicide bomb attacks on Shiite Muslims in Karbala and Baghdad killed more than 180 people. On Sept. 14, 2005, 10 car bombs exploded across Baghdad, killing more than 100 people and injuring at least 150.

The study's findings, published on the Web site of the New England Journal of Medicine, are based on information collected during a wider survey of family health in Iraq, designed to provide a basis for the Iraqi government to develop and update health policies and plan services.

The difficulties in gathering accurate results led the researchers to conclude that the number of Iraqi deaths in the survey period, which included Iraq-based combatants, was between 104,000 and 223,000.

``Some homes could not be visited because of high levels of insecurity, and more people move residence in times of conflict,'' Iraqi Health Minister Salih Mahdi Motlab al-Hasanawi said in a statement accompanying the report. ``These factors were taken into account in the analysis, as they may affect the accuracy of the survey work.''

`Shot Dead'

Ties Boerma, the WHO's director of measurement and health information systems and co-author of the report, said, ``Sadly during the course of the survey, one of our main co- investigators, a co-director of the central office of statistics, was shot dead on his way to work in Baghdad.''

In October 2006, the Lancet, a U.K. medical journal, published a report by the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the School of Medicine at Baghdad's al-Mustansiriya University, which stated that more than 600,000 people had died violent deaths in Iraq since the invasion.

Findings Dismissed

President George W. Bush dismissed the findings in that report after it was published, saying he didn't consider them ``credible.'' U.S. General George Casey, then commander of Multinational Forces in Iraq and now Army chief of staff, told reporters after the Lancet's publication that the study's figures were ``way, way beyond any number that I have seen,'' and that he hadn't seen ``a number higher than 50,000.''

Leslie Phillips, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the report, saying the administration has not had a chance to review it.

Iraq Body Count's latest count of violent deaths among civilians ranges from a total of 80,381 to 87,792 since the invasion. The group compiles its figures from media reports and data supplied by hospitals, morgues, non-governmental organizations as well as official statistics.

Some 3,912 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq, 3,183 of them killed in action, according to the Department of Defense Web site. Britain has lost 174 military and civilian personnel, according to the U.K. Ministry of Defence Web site.

The WHO study also showed that 57 percent of the women interviewed said they had heard of AIDS. That compares with 84 percent of women in Turkey and Egypt, 91 percent in Morocco and 97 percent in Jordan. The WHO called the Iraq percentage ``worryingly low.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Camilla Hall in London at chall24@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 9, 2008 18:15 EST