Jan 10 (Reuters) - About 151,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of their country, according to new World Health Organisation (WHO) research.

The study which said violent deaths could have ranged from 104,000 to 223,000 between March 2003 and June 2006, is the most comprehensive since the war started.

Here are some details of the various estimates of civilian tolls in Iraq:

* While well below that figure, the United Nations agency's estimate exceeds the widely-cited 80,000 to the nearly 88,000 death toll by the human rights group Iraq Body Count (IBC).

-- The IBC Web site says its figures are drawn from crosschecked media reports of the violence leading to the death of civilians, or of bodies being found. It is supplemented by reviewing hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures.

* In October 2006 the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland published a study in which researchers from Johns Hopkins and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad carried out a survey which estimated that as a result of the war, about 655,000 people in the country of about 27 million have died above the number expected to have died without war. That meant that 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population had died because of the invasion and ensuing strife.

-- At a White House news conference at the time U.S. President George W. Bush said: "I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General (George) Casey (top U.S. commander in Iraq) and neither do Iraqi officials."

-- Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh also said at the time, "The report is unbelievable. These numbers are exaggerated and not precise." Iraq then put the total death toll since the war started at 40,000.

* In December 2005, Bush gave a rare estimate of the number of civilians killed since the U.S.-led invasion, acknowledging that 30,000 citizens had died in the violence. The president's figure, which his aides stressed was not official, was in the range given by the Iraq Body Count at the time.

Sources: Reuters/www.iraqbodycount.org/ (Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit)

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