BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – A roadside bomb that was apparently intended for a passing U.S. military convoy missed its target Tuesday, exploding in a densely populated Baghdad neighborhood and killing an Iraqi civilian.

The attack in the Karrada neighborhood shattered windows on the busy street and destroyed a concrete road median, but did not wound any U.S. troops.

“They’ve not killed any Americans, just Iraqis as usual,” said Karim Abbas, a shopkeeper. “We consider it terrorism.”

Bystanders said the Iraqi who died had worked in a nearby shop.

Roadside bombs have become the preferred weapon of anti-American guerrillas who generally lack the firepower of troops of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

In Baghdad, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said U.S. forces had detained a total of 101 suspected opponents of the U.S.-led coalition in the past 24 hours.

Earlier Tuesday, U.S. troops said they detained three former army officers suspected of conducting anti-American attacks. During the raid in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, the American soldiers blew up the entrance to a house.

“We had a report of a terrorist cell which has been conducting terrorist attacks on coalition forces,” Sgt. 1st Class David Wicklund told Associated Press Television News. “We came here in the early morning hours and caught them while they were sleeping.”

The men appeared to be midlevel officials of the former regime. The highest ranking official was a major.

Kimmitt said the number of engagements between coalition forces and insurgents have stayed “relatively the same” since the Dec. 13 capture of Saddam Hussein.

“Unfortunately, some of those have been more deadly,” he said in a reference to a coordinated assault on Saturday in the southern city of Karbala that killed 19 people. The victims included five Bulgarian soldiers, two Thai soldiers, six Iraqi police officers and six Iraqi civilians.

In Bangkok, Thailand, military officers, government officials and family members paid respects to their two slain soldiers as their bodies arrived in the Thai capital on Tuesday.

The two soldiers, Sgt. Amporn Chulert, 46, and Sgt. Mit Klaharn, 43, were killed when a car rammed into the wall of the Thai camp in Karbala and exploded.

Dan Senor, spokesman for the U.S. administration in Iraq, said U.S.-led forces and their Iraqi allies were stepping up security at gasoline stations and production facilities to curb fuel smuggling.

Senor said a total of 70,000 Iraqi police were now operating across the country, including 7,000 in Baghdad, a city of 5 million. Homicide and violent robbery rates have fallen dramatically as a result, he said.

On Monday, U.S. troops near Samarra and Baqouba, north of Baghdad, uncovered three large caches of weaponry believed to belong to Iraqis selling arms to insurgents. Soldiers seized hundreds of rockets, missiles, mortar and tank shells and assault rifles and thousands of rounds of light arms ammunition.

Some of the weaponry had been stripped down into parts used to assemble roadside bombs, which have caused a large number of coalition casualties, according to the U.S. military.

AP-ES-12-30-03 1516EST