At least one US soldier was killed by unidentified gunmen, as the US-led administration in Baghdad authorized spending 100 million dollars to reconstruct the battered country's infrastructure. Amid the ongoing violence, US administrator Paul Bremer forged ahead with plans to appoint an interim Iraqi administration, shrugging off boycott threats from some political groups and repeating his warnings to Iran to stay out of Iraq's affairs. The soldier from the US 82nd Airborne Division was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at a weapons collection point in Baghdad, the US Central Command said in a statement. Another soldier was wounded when two men jumped out of a van and fired two rocket-propelled grenades, the statement said. "The soldiers were evacuated to a field medical facility for treatment, and one soldier later died of his injuries. The injured soldier is listed in critical condition," the statement said. Bremer meanwhile forged ahead with efforts to rebuild Iraq's battered infrastructure and establish a stable, democratic government. He said 100 million dollars in seized Iraqi funds would be allocated for stopgap public works projects to create thousands of jobs in a country where, even before the war, unemployment was unofficially at more than 50 percent. Bremer said decisions had already been taken to complete the Baghdad Surgical Hospital and the last 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the Baghdad-Basra highway. Bremer also turned his attention to Iraq's political restoration, shrugging off threats by some of Iraq's main political factions to boycott an interim administration after he scrapped plans to select its members through a national conference. Established parties which led the resistance against Saddam from exile have expressed anger at Bremer's plans to scrap the promised national conference and choose the administration's members himself. Groups from opposite ends of the political spectrum have warned they might not be able to take part in an interim body which is not chosen solely by Iraqis as it would be seen as a puppet government. The Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose 15,000 Shiite Muslim militiamen were kept out of Iraq throughout the war by coalition threats of military action, said it had told Bremer it would only take part in an administration chosen by Iraqis. Ahmed Chalabi, head of the liberal Iraqi National Congress, which contributed troops to the coalition war effort, warned in New York that "it is not possible to manufacture leaders." **Associated Press Tallies 3,240 Civilian Deaths in Iraq*** At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll - if it is ever tallied - is sure to be significantly higher. Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP tally is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south. The AP count was based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals - including almost all of the large ones - and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when fighting was dying down and coalition forces announced they would soon declare major combat over. AP journalists traveled to all of these hospitals, studying their logs, examining death certificates where available and interviewing officials about what they witnessed. The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in Iraq's largest cities and most intense battles aren't reflected in the total. During the first weeks of the war, the Iraqi government made its own attempt to keep track of civilian deaths, but that effort fell apart as U.S. troops neared Baghdad and the government began to topple. The U.S. military did not count civilian casualties because "our efforts are focused on military tasks," said Lt. Col. Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman. The British Defense Ministry said it didn't count casualties either. Cassella said getting an accurate count would have been nearly impossible because of the amount of weaponry used by both sides over wide swaths of a country of 24 million people. In the 1991 Gulf War an estimated 2,278 civilians were killed, according to Iraqi civil defense authorities. No U.S. or independent count is known to have been made. That war consisted of seven weeks of bombing and 100 hours of ground war, and did not take U.S. forces into any Iraqi cities. This time it was very different. In a war in which the Iraqi soldiery melted away into crowded cities, changed into plainclothes or wore no uniform to begin with, separating civilian and military casualties is often impossible. Adding to the civilian toll was the regime's tactic of parking its troops and weapons in residential neighborhoods, creating targets for U.S. bombs that increased the casualties among noncombatants. The United States said its sophisticated weaponry minimized the toll, and around the country are sites that, to look at them, bolster the claim: missiles that tore deep into government buildings but left the surrounding houses untouched. Among the documents studied by AP journalists was the register at Kadhemiya General Hospital in Baghdad. Someone has taped up the shredded binding, as if that could fix the horrors inside. There are pages bathed in dried, reddish-brown blood, their letters smeared and unintelligible. It and other registers at hospitals across the country record the names, ages and addresses of patients, the diagnoses and operations, the recoveries, and the deaths. They also list professions: for example, butcher, carpenter, soldier, student, or policeman. The AP investigation had to depend on the accuracy of the hospitals in distinguishing between soldier and civilians as there was no way to verify the records. Some of the best record-keeping was in Baghdad, where AP journalists visited all 24 hospitals that took in war casualties. Their logs provided a count of 1,896 civilians killed. There were certainly more civilians dead; a few hospitals lost count as fighting intensified. Meanwhile, from city to city, block to block, house to house, Iraqis are trying to come to terms with their losses. For many, the personal tragedy is more important than whether the casualty count is 3,000, or double that, or more. There is little agreement about whether being freed from Saddam's tyranny was worth the cost in lives. "If they didn't want to kill civilians, why did they fire into civilian areas?" asked Ayad Jassim Ibrahim, a 32-year-old Basra fireman who said his brother Alaa was killed by shrapnel from a U.S. missile that tore into his living room. **PHOTO CAPTION*** A U.S. Army soldier walks over the body of an Iraqi civilian in Baghdad, April 9, 2003. The soldiers from the A Company 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment had fired into the building after being shot at by rocket propelled grenades or RPGs. (AP Photo/John Moore)