U.S. Forces Release 27 Held After Disputed Afghan Raid

U.S. forces in Afghanistan on Wednesday released 27 prisoners who had been detained in a commando raid last month that interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai has said killed more than a dozen of his supporters.

A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said interrogators have determined that the detainees weren’t affiliated with the Taliban or Al Qaeda network, contrary to initial suspicions. But the spokesman, Maj. Ralph Mills, defended their capture, saying all 27 had fired at U.S. forces.

“We determined based on available evidence that they were not Taliban forces, nor were they affiliated with Al Qaeda,” Mills said of the men released Wednesday. “But we’re not saying it was a mistake to detain them. We detained them because they were shooting at us.”

He said many of those taken in the raid were “known criminals.” He did not elaborate. The prisoners were released to the custody of local Afghan authorities in Tarin Kowt, north of the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

After two weeks of conflicting accounts of the raid on a reputed terrorist hide-out, the Pentagon made no official announcement of error Wednesday. Central Command has been investigating whether about 18 others killed in the attack were Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters.

In another strike on suspected terrorists, a group of alleged senior Al Qaeda members in southeastern Afghanistan was struck by a missile fired by remote control from a pilotless CIA drone aircraft, a U.S. official said Wednesday.

“We believe there was a death or two and probably severe injuries among the rest,” the official said of the strike, which took place Monday.

In the earlier raid in the central province of Uruzgan, Karzai and local officials have asserted, anti-Taliban Afghans were among those killed or captured.

Karzai told the Washington Post this week that the predawn Jan. 24 raid by Army Rangers was “a mistake of sorts,” resulting from “an unfortunate movement of people at the wrong time” that left a number of supporters of his U.S.-backed government dead.

Karzai said he had also concluded that vehicles attacked by U.S. warplanes near the city of Khowst in December were carrying tribal leaders to his inauguration in the capital, Kabul, and not Taliban leaders, as U.S. commanders were told.

Karzai said that U.S. troops have handed out payments to the families of those killed in the strike on the convoy and offered their apologies. Local Afghan officials have put the amount of the payments at $1,000 for each family.

During a break Wednesday in testimony on Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the task of identifying terrorist suspects has become especially difficult as the new Afghan government works to include those once loyal to the routed Taliban but now willing to switch loyalties. “So how anyone would identify people at any given moment is not simple,” he said.

Pentagon officials said Wednesday that they continue to believe that the convoy was a legitimate target. They declined to comment Wednesday on the issue of payments.

The Pentagon also initially defended the January raid. But last week, when officials of Karzai’s government complained that their supporters had been killed, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the senior commander of the war, launched an investigation.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the time that basic facts about the raid--including who shot first--had yet to be verified.

U.S. intelligence analysts believed that Al Qaeda or Taliban forces were using the site for a munitions depot, Myers said. One U.S. soldier was wounded in the ankle during the raid.

Some Afghans say that Taliban renegades were handing over weapons to Karzai’s government at the site and that some pro-Karzai figures were killed and that others--including a police chief, his deputy and members of a district council--were among those arrested.

Guards at the Kandahar home of Karzai’s brother, Ahmed, said two of the prisoners had been released not Wednesday but Tuesday and had come by to thank him and the interim prime minister for their efforts in securing their release. The guards said the two former prisoners had spent the night at the residence.

The raid was one in a series carried out by U.S. Special Forces--sometimes in tandem with Afghan troops--in a bid to extinguish pockets of Taliban and Al Qaeda resistance.

Hamid Karzai said the United States has in several instances been intentionally misled by local warlords engaged in internecine rivalries, who tricked American forces into targeting anti-Taliban officials.

Meanwhile, U.S. military planes resumed the transfer of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Wednesday. About 30 prisoners left Kandahar aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane in the first of about five flights planned to the U.S. naval base in Cuba during the next two weeks, a senior defense official said.

The prisoner transfers were suspended Jan. 23 so that additional temporary open-air cells could be built. One hundred and sixty new cells are now ready to receive prisoners, officials said Wednesday. Like the others already built, they are made of chain-link fencing, with concrete floors and wood-and-metal roofs.

*

Times staff writer Eric Slater in Kandahar contributed to this report.