Washington ? U.S. forces in Afghanistan admitted Wednesday that they captured the wrong people during a controversial Jan. 23 raid, releasing 27 captives to the Afghan government after determining they were neither Taliban nor al-Qaida fighters.

The United States is investigating whether 19 people killed during the Special Forces raid included some friendly forces. Even though the investigation has not been completed, a U.S. official confirmed that the dead men’s families have been paid compensation of $1,000 each in U.S. cash, payments that came from CIA funds.

Villagers look at the destruction left by U.S. forces following a Jan. 23 raid at a school in the town of Khas Uruzgan, in the mountains of southern Afghanistan. Bursting into rooms full of sleeping men, U.S. forces reportedly killed 19 men who witnesses and survivors say were allies of the U.S.-backed government. An investigation by U.S. Central Command is trying to determine whether some or all of the estimated 19 people killed were innocents, Maj. Ralph Mills, a spokesman for the command, said Wednesday.

U.S. officials originally portrayed the raid on a suspected al-Qaida hideout as a successful strike designed to root out a pocket of enemy troops that was trying to reconstitute itself about 60 miles north of Kandahar.

In the days after, local Afghans said the U.S. raid had gone awry, killing anti-Taliban troops loyal to Afghanistan’s interim leader Hamid Karzai and capturing other friendly forces, including a local police chief and his deputy, as well as members of a district council.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this week acknowledged the possibility that some friendly forces were killed. A Central Command investigation of the deaths is expected to continue for one or two weeks.

Mills also said some of the 27 who were released were local criminals not involved in the war, but did not elaborate.

U.S. officials Wednesday continued to defend the Special Forces’ decision to open fire at the compound and to take prisoners, saying they were fired upon by men inside the compound who were not wearing any uniforms. One U.S. soldier was shot in the ankle.

“This is no different than if a police officer in this country is shot at. … You would take into custody the person doing the shooting,” said Maj. Ralph Mills, a Central Command spokesman.

Mills said U.S. forces had credible intelligence that led them to believe the compound was a legitimate al-Qaida target. “There was a reason we went in there, and we stand firm on that,” Mills said.

But Rumsfeld and others have spoken frequently of the difficulty in distinguishing friendly and unfriendly forces in Afghanistan, a nation where allegiances can change frequently.

As one senior defense official said of the raid: “There are some who think we did get bad guys, but they were good guys three weeks ago. That’s the complexity.”

The issue of civilian casualties in the war has proven difficult for Karzai, who has come under some pressure in Afghanistan to push the United States to minimize such mistakes.

Karzai told the Washington Post this week that he believes the United States did kill some innocents in the raid, because of “an unfortunate movement of people at the wrong time.”

Karzai said he also had concluded that a convoy of vehicles attacked by U.S. warplanes near the city of Khost in December were carrying “tribal elders” to his inauguration in Kabul, and that the U.S. commanders had been purposely misled into believing that the convoy was carrying Taliban officials.

The senior U.S. defense official, however, continued to defend that attack Wednesday as well, saying the Pentagon believes that a ranking Taliban or al-Qaida official was killed in the attack.