WASHINGTON — An Army Ranger who was with Pat Tillman when the former football star died by friendly fire said yesterday that he was told by a higher-up to conceal that information from Tillman’s brother.

“I was ordered not to tell him,” Army Specialist Bryan O’Neal told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

He said he was given the order by then-Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Bailey, the battalion commander who oversaw Tillman’s platoon.

Pat Tillman’s brother, Kevin, was in a convoy behind his brother when the incident happened, but didn’t see it. Specialist O’Neal said Colonel Bailey told him specifically not to tell Kevin Tillman that the death was friendly fire rather than heroic engagement with the enemy.

“He basically just said, sir, that uh, ‘Do not let Kevin know, he’s probably in a bad place knowing that his brother’s dead,'” Specialist O’Neal said. He added that Colonel Bailey made clear that he would “get in trouble” if he told.

Kevin Tillman was not in the hearing room when Specialist O’Neal spoke.

In earlier testimony, Kevin Tillman accused the military of “intentional falsehoods” and “deliberate and careful misrepresentations” in portraying Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan as the result of heroic engagement with the enemy instead of friendly fire.

“We believe this narrative was intended to deceive the family but more importantly the American public,” Kevin Tillman told a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee hearing. “Pat’s death was clearly the result of fratricide,” he said, contending that the military’s misstatements amounted to “fraud.”

“Revealing that Pat’s death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster in a month of political disasters … so the truth needed to be suppressed,” Mr. Tillman said.

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat of California, accused the government of inventing “sensational details and stories” about Pat Tillman’s death and the 2003 rescue of Jessica Lynch, perhaps the most famous victims of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

“The government violated its most basic responsibility,” said Mr. Waxman.

Ms. Lynch, then an Army private, was badly injured when her convoy was ambushed in Iraq. She was subsequently rescued by American troops from an Iraqi hospital but the tale of her ambush was changed into a story of heroism on her part.

Still hampered by her injuries, Ms. Lynch walked slowly to the witness table and took a seat alongside Tillman’s family members.

“The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies,” Ms. Lynch said.

Kevin Tillman said his family has sought for years to get at the truth and have now concluded that they were “being actively thwarted by powers that are more interested in protecting a narrative than getting at the truth and seeing justice is served.”