BAGHDAD, Sept 19: US soldiers rounded up 55 people around Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit on Friday on suspicion of participating in an ambush that left three American soldiers dead and two wounded, an officer said.

The crackdown came with US forces reeling from a series of attacks in an area north and west of Baghdad, with the rhythm accelerating since Wednesday’s release of a purported audiotaped call to arms by Saddam.

With US forces on edge amid a growing campaign of attacks, an American soldier accidentally shot dead an Iraqi translator working for an Italian diplomat here, a foreign ministry source in Rome said.

US officials said three soldiers from the US 4th Infantry Division were killed and two wounded late on Thursday after they came under small-arms fire outside Saddam’s bastion of Tikrit in central Iraq.

“They were inspecting a suspected mortar launch site when the ambush occurred,” Corporal Vernon O’Donnell told AFP after the incident, about 170 kilometers north of Baghdad.

US military officials also said an American soldier was electrocuted on Thursday afternoon while clearing away dangerously low power lines about 50 kilometers north of the capital.

The incident outside Tikrit prompted a sweep of the area that led to the arrest of 55 people. It also turned up an assortment of AK-47 machineguns, pistols and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers, said Captain Mark Paine.

Two US convoys also came under separate attack late on Thursday around the town of Baqubah, 66 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, witnesses said. But there was no report of casualties.

In the latest case of wayward firing by US troops, soldiers shot at the car of Pietro Cordone, an Italian diplomat and adviser to the US-led coalition, as it was at a roadblock between the northern city of Mosul and Tikrit.

A source at the foreign ministry in Rome said Cordone’s Iraqi translator was killed. He said “the US authorities in Iraq expressed regret for the incident at the highest level.”

MINE BLASTS KILL THREE: Three people were killed and four wounded, including a US soldier, when two mines dating to the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein went off near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, an Iraqi police officer said on Friday.