BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Police have recovered 60 bodies over the past day across Baghdad, most bound and tortured, officials said on Wednesday, highlighting how sectarian death squads are still plaguing the Iraqi capital despite a major security drive.

Two car bombs targeting police killed 22 people during the morning and wounded another 76 people. The first killed 14 outside Baghdad's traffic police headquarters, a second targeted police guarding an electricity station in the east of the city.

The death of another U.S. soldier was confirmed in Anbar province, where the commander denied suggestions his force had lost control to Al-Qaeda and other Sunni insurgents but said stabilizing the western desert region would be a job for Iraqi politicians and their growing, U.S.-trained troops and police.

A U.S. soldier was also killed overnight near Baghdad.

U.S. and Iraqi leaders say that the biggest threat to Iraq no longer comes from the three-year-old revolt among ousted president Saddam Hussein's fellow Sunni Muslims but from conflict between Sunnis and the Shia majority now in power.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was in Iran for a second day of meetings. His fellow Shia Islamist leaders pledged support for Iraq and efforts to avert civil war.

An Interior Ministry official and sources at Baghdad police headquarters said a total of 60 unidentified bodies were found in various parts of Baghdad over the past day.

The unusually high daily tally, recorded despite a month-old security crackdown by reinforced U.S. and Iraqi troops, comprised 45 in west Baghdad and 15 east of the Tigris river.

Most were bound and shot in the head and many bore signs of torture, the source said -- trademarks of sectarian death squads and kidnap gangs plaguing the Iraqi capital.

The United Nations estimated two months ago that about 100 people a day were being killed in a covert sectarian dirty war.

U.S. military commanders have said the increased presence of troops on the street, sweeping through violent neighborhoods to prepare them for Iraqi police control, had reduced the "murder rate" by more than 40 percent in August. That figure included individual shootings but not bigger attacks such as bombings.

Last week, the UN office in Baghdad said the number of unidentified bodies taken to the city morgue in August fell by about 17 percent from the record month of July to 1,536. Morgue officials, who have stopped giving data to the media, say that about 90 percent of the bodies they see are victims of violence.

The Health Ministry has yet to publish its complementary full data for other violent deaths in August. Figures for July put the total at more than 3,000 people, concentrated in Baghdad, where more than one in four Iraqis live.

The killings have made tens of thousands flee areas where they are in a minority and hardening a divide along the Tigris between mainly Sunni west Baghdad and the mainly Shia east.