THE US military has said it believes 54 insurgents were killed in intense exchanges in the northern Iraqi town of Samarra on Sunday but commanders admitted they had no bodies.

The only corpses at the city's hospital were those of ordinary civilians, including two elderly Iranian pilgrims and a child.

US Brigadier General Mark Kimmit told a Baghdad press conference 54 militants were killed, 22 wounded and one arrested.

…A few hours earlier, Colonel Fredrick Rudesheim, who heads the 3rd Combat Brigades that was involved in Sunday's bloody clashes, told reporters his troops had killed 46 and captured another 11.

"Are you asking me to produce (them)?" he asked, when asked by reporters about the absence of any militants' bodies at Samarra's single hospital or on the city's streets.

…The mystery, which borders on solving a mathematics equation, further deepened with Col Gonsalves' report.

According to him, a total of 60 militants, divided into two groups, attacked two convoys escorting new Iraqi currency to banks in the city.

Another four assailants in a BMW attacked a separate engineering convoy.

If the US troops killed 46 and captured 11 of them, only three of the survivors would have been left to pick up the corpses.

…Salaheddin Mawlud, a colonel in the former Iraqi army, who now heads Samarra city council's complaints office, said the American toll does not work.

"If there had been so many dead, we would have seen people rushing to the hospital, the police station or here, and it just didn't happen."

Abdelrizek Jadwa, who owns a grocery 50m from the scene of one of the attacks, said he did not have the shadow of a doubt.

"After the firing, I went out of my shop. There were no wounded, no killed on the streets. Where could they have disappeared?"