US troops were ambushed near Saddam Hussein's hometown today, as UN nuclear experts began work to assess looting at Iraq's main nuclear facility.
The US military said a soldier died and four were wounded when gunmen fired small arms and a rocket-propelled grenade at them near Tikrit, 175 km north of Baghdad.
It was the latest in a series of attacks on US forces in Sunni Muslim areas in central Iraq that the military blames on Baathist remnants of Saddam's ousted government.
The US-led administration now ruling Iraq said it had detained a former deputy police commander on Friday night for trying to create a Baathist cell within the police force.
UN experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) started a limited mission to see how much material is missing from a looted storage complex at the sprawling nuclear compound at Tuwaitha south of Baghdad.
"The team from the IAEA...will go to Tuwaitha today and conduct an assessment," a US spokesman said. There was no word on whether the experts had actually gone to the site.
The seven-member IAEA team is operating under tight guidelines from the Pentagon, which does not want to open the door to a renewed role for the agency in postwar Iraq.
The United States is expanding its own team to hunt for Saddam's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and wants to exclude the IAEA and other UN arms inspectors.
The failure of the United States and Britain to find any banned weapons since their March 20 invasion has fuelled a political furore over whether they misled the world by arguing that Iraq posed a deadly threat to international security.