Baghdad - One US soldier was killed on Friday in the northern city of Amara, while two Iraqi policemen were killed in Mosul.

A US soldier was killed when a bomb went off near his patrol south of Amara city, the US military said on Friday.

The soldier, who was killed on Thursday, was the first US military death in Iraq this month, according to the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.

The number of US soldiers killed in Iraq since the March 2003 US- led invasion rose to 4,177. The September toll was 25. The number hit an all-time low in July with 13 killed.

Two policemen were killed and another wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in central Mosul city, 400 kilometres north of the capital, a local police source said.

The blast took place when the patrol arrived at the area to examine a policeman's house that had been the target of an earlier bomb attack, the source said.

In another incident, US troops captured one wanted man and detained 17 suspects during operations to hunt down the al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorist network.

Earlier on Friday, a US forces media advisor said that more than 2,250 Iraqi detainees were released during the fasting month of Ramadan which ended this week.

Some 17,800 Iraqi prisoners are in US detention centres as well as foreigners, he told VOI.

In separate developments, Iraqi police killed a gunman and arrested four others during a house raid in Mosul, a spokesman for the Nineveh operations command said. (dpa)