WASHINGTON — The Army has completed its latest investigation into football star Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death while a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan but is refusing to make public the findings.

The new inquiry was launched in November after Tillman family members and others raised questions about why the Pentagon initially held back or even distorted some details of Tillman's death on April 22, 2004.

"The investigation is done," said Lt. Col. Hans Bush, chief of public affairs for the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., which conducted the new investigation. On Wednesday, he described the written report as "huge in the level of detail" but declined to elaborate.

Tillman's family got a briefing on the inquiry "only a couple of weeks ago," Bush said, adding that there was "a degree of satisfaction expressed by the family." The aim of the investigation, he said, was to address concerns that have been raised about whether the Army held back some information about Tillman's death.

"And, really, the most important thing: what really did happen," he said.

Bush said he has been instructed by Army officials that there is "nothing" from the report that now can be publicly released.

He referred all other questions about the investigation to Paul Boyce of the Department of the Army's media-relations unit. Boyce did not return telephone calls. His office referred questions to Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman at the Pentagon.

"We are not going to release it," Hart said.

Tillman's parents, widow and other family members did not return telephone calls this week to discuss what they were told about the investigation's findings. But Patrick Tillman Sr., when asked whether it was true that the family was satisfied, responded on Wednesday: "No. And I don't want to talk about it."

Tillman, 27, had walked away from a lucrative contract extension offered by the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army in 2002.

To many people, his decision made him a symbol of patriotism.

But questions about whether the Army deliberately concealed details of Tillman's death emerged after the Pentagon acknowledged, five weeks after the fact, that he was not killed by Taliban and al-Qaida fighters on April 22 but by a section of his own Army Rangers platoon.

In fact, it was The Arizona Republic, not the military, that first informed Tillman's parents on May 28 that the Army had concluded that their son, who held the rank of Army specialist in the 75th Ranger Regiment, likely was killed by friendly fire.

Up to then, the public's understanding of what had happened to Tillman had been largely shaped by the Army's public news release on April 30, purportedly giving details of Tillman's death in southeastern Afghanistan.

That release made no mention of friendly fire. Rather, it announced that Tillman was posthumously receiving the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his actions and focused on how he was leading a team of Rangers up a hill to suppress enemy fire when he died.

Even after The Republic reported May 29 that he was killed by friendly fire, the Army continued to imply in a news release later that day that Tillman had been trying to suppress enemy fire when he was killed.

But according to other newspaper accounts since then, Afghan police and militia commanders and local residents in Afghanistan say that Army Rangers simply may have overreacted to an explosion, either a land mine or roadside bomb, leading to wild firing by Rangers that killed not just Tillman but also an Afghan militiaman.

One of those accounts, by The Washington Post, also revealed that Army commanders as early as April 30 already had taken at least 14 sworn statements from Tillman's own platoon members that made clear the true cause of his death.

Last November, then-acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee ordered a new investigation into whether and why the Pentagon may have deliberately concealed such details.

Though the Army refused to release the report this week, Bush, the spokesman for the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, said requests for the report filed under the federal Freedom of Information Act will be weighed.

But what material eventually will be made public and to whom, when and how are decisions being made by Army officials based at the Pentagon, Bush said.

Those officials are in the process of redacting, or deleting, parts of the report for reasons of privacy or because they contain classified information, he said.