BAGHDAD (AP) – American troops have questioned hundreds of people and detained 11 in the search for three American soldiers feared captured by Al Qaeda during a deadly weekend ambush south of Baghdad, the military said Tuesday.

Four American soldiers and an Iraqi were killed in the weekend ambush and their vehicles burned. Two Defense Department officials said they could not yet identify one of the dead, hampering the military’s ability to determine who was missing. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the families had not been notified.

“We have conducted more than 450 tactical interviews and detained 11 individuals” as of Monday night, U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said.

Two of the dead soldiers, including a 19-year-old whose stepfather is also serving in Iraq, were identified by their families.

For a fourth day, jets, helicopters and unmanned surveillance aircraft crisscrossed the skies over the sparsely populated farm area near Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad to search for the missing soldiers. U.S. and Iraqi troops – backed by dog teams – searched vehicles and pedestrians. Other teams peered into crawl spaces and probed for possible secret chambers in homes.

Among the dead was Sergeant 1st Class James David Connell Jr., 40, of Lake City, Tenn., whose family learned Saturday he had been killed. The soldier had just recovered from a shrapnel wound to the leg and had visited his family on leave earlier this month.

“I’m proud of my dad, because he didn’t really fight for himself, he fought for the country,” Connell’s teenage daughter, Courtney, told Knoxville’s WATE-TV.

Also killed was 19-year-old Private first class Daniel Courneya, of Vermontville, Mich.

In Michigan, students at Maple Valley High School created a memorial for Courneya, who graduated in 2005 and was well-known in the small community southwest of Lansing. He was a member of the school’s track and soccer teams and played clarinet in the band.

“It’s a tribute of photos, posters, plaques and a picture of him in his uniform,” school official Kelly Zank told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Courneya’s mother, Wendy Thompson, said her husband, Army Specialist David Thompson, was in Iraq and returning home after learning of his stepson’s death.

The dead and missing are from the 10th Mount Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, Company D, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the “Polar Bears” and based at Fort Drum in New York.

On Monday, the Islamic State of Iraq – an Al Qaeda front group that claims it has the soldiers – warned America to halt its search by about 4,000 troops, and the Pentagon acknowledged for the first time that it believes the soldiers are in terrorist hands.

Last June, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the deaths of two American soldiers whose mutilated bodies were later found in the same area.

The three were last seen before a pre-dawn ambush Saturday that destroyed several Humvees in an American convoy and killed four Americans and an Iraqi soldier traveling with them. During the search Monday, America and Iraqi forces exchanged fire with gunmen near the town of Youssifiyah, killing two and injuring four, an Iraqi army officer said.

On Tuesday, an Iraqi interpreter working with the American soldiers said the coalition’s search was focusing on rural areas outside Mahmoudiya and that life was proceeding as normal in the city.

But he also said Iraqi civilians being stopped for questioning by American forces appeared nervous that they could be attacked by insurgents later, if they were seen cooperating with the coalition. The interpreter spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his own security.

The area around Mahmoudiya has long been especially volatile because Saddam Hussein recruited members of Sunni tribes there into his elite Republican Guard and intelligence services. Many of them were believed to have joined the insurgency after Saddam’s regime collapsed in the 2003 American=led invasion. American officers also say extremists have fled Baghdad for surrounding areas to escape the three-month Baghdad security crackdown.

Elsewhere, attacks using bombs or mortars killed a total of 10 people in two markets in Baghdad, and dozens of suspected insurgents attacked a village north of the capital, killing five civilians and wounding 14, Iraqi authorities said.

A mortar or rocket slammed into the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, wounding five American Embassy contractors, a spokesman said. American Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said there were no deaths and property damage was minimal. He said the contractors’ nationalities had “not yet been confirmed.”

Mr. Fintor said the embassy was “open and functioning normally.”

Under a new government policy limiting media coverage of such tragedies, Iraqi police prevented news photographers and cameramen from filming the scene.

The order, announced over the weekend, is aimed at preventing journalists from inadvertently tampering with evidence, protecting the privacy of the wounded and keeping insurgents and militias from keeping track of their success rate.

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Associated Press writer Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.