Baghdad

NYTimes — An explosion apparently caused by a bomb inside a district council building in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad on Tuesday killed two American soldiers and two civilians working for the United States military, the American command said.

The explosion took place at around 9.30 a.m. as four council officials were gathering in a room for a meeting with five Americans to discuss the election of senior local council members, a spokesman for the council said.

American officials could not immediately confirm the nationalities of the civilian workers, but Iraqi council members who were at the scene of the attack described the civilians as American.

Later, a United States Embassy spokeswoman in Baghdad, Mirembe Nantongo, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying the dead civilians were American and included one State Department and one Defense Department employee.

A third American soldier was wounded in the attack, the military said in a statement. At least six Iraqi civilians also died in the attack, The Associated Press reported, and the United States military said a suspect in the apparent bombing had been detained after he was caught “leaving the scene and tested positive for explosive residue.”

The latest deaths follow an incident on Monday when a security guard for an Iraqi politician grabbed his Kalashnikov automatic rifle and opened fire on at least a half-dozen American soldiers, killing two of them. That attack took place during a meeting with Iraqi officials in a village southeast of Baghdad, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.