BAGRAM, Afghanistan – Four suspected Arab terrorists broke out of an American military detention facility in Afghanistan yesterday, fleeing through barbed-wire stockades in the first escape from the compound since the American military took over the former Soviet airbase.

Also yesterday, rescuers reported finding the body of a U.S. Navy SEAL, the last to be accounted for from a four-man special forces unit that disappeared after a June 28 ambush in the rugged mountains in the east of the country.

American and Afghan forces launched a manhunt for the suspects, identified as Arabs from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Libya. American soldiers set up roadblocks, and helicopters clattered low over villages near the heavily guarded base north of the capital, Kabul.

Bagram is in a wide, dusty plain at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains, and much of the area around the base remains mined from Afghanistan’s civil war and Soviet occupation. The base itself is surrounded by a series of barbed wire fences and is intensely guarded by American troops. The main entrance is a series of checkpoints and all visitors are checked several times by American military guards.

The escapes were another setback for the American military as it struggles with insurgent fighting that has left more than 700 people dead in three months and threatened to sabotage three years of progress toward peace. Over the weekend, 22 Afghan soldiers were killed, including 10 who were beheaded.

The discovery of the body of the U.S. Navy SEAL in Kunar province on Sunday ended a desperate search for the final unaccounted for member of the special-forces team. One of the four was rescued July 3, and two were found dead the next day.

A U.S. military spokesman, Colonel James Yonts, said the American commando had died in fighting soon after the ambush, and he denied claims by a purported Taliban spokesman that the SEAL was captured alive and beheaded.

“There have been claims of being beheaded,” he said. But “there was no indication supporting the claims. … This individual was never in custody, he was never defamed or disgraced.”

He said the injuries on the commando’s body were consistent with “a firefight, a combat operation with smalls arms fire, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] rounds.”

Colonel Yonts said the commando’s body was found near where an American helicopter that was bringing reinforcements crashed in Korangal Valley in a rugged “area that we had looked over before. But where his body was located was hard to find.”

Sixteen troops died in the June 28 chopper crash, the deadliest single attack on the American military since the war began here in 2001.

The surviving commando was saved by an Afghan shepherd named Gulab, who found him wounded in the mountains and took him to his home, according to an article based on an interview with the villager in this week’s edition of Time magazine.

Despite demands from the insurgents to hand over the American, Gulab and his neighbors refused because of a tribal honor code that bars them from refusing sanctuary to a guest, the report said. The shepherd later escorted the American to the nearest U.S. base in the town of Asadabad.

American military officials in Kabul have declined to comment on how the commando was rescued.

The four terrorist suspects who escaped yesterday from the American military detention facility at Bagram were identified as Abdullah from Syria, Mohammed al-Qatari from Saudi Arabia, Mahmood Ahmad from Kuwait, and Abulbakar Mohammed Hassan from Libya, according to a police chief, Abdulrahman Mawalana.