BUFFALO - A man was fatally shot by police Tuesday after aiming a gun at officers inside a home targeted in a law enforcement sweep of suspected drug dealers in Buffalo, police said.

The man, whose identity was not released, was not among 27 people named in a federal indictment who were being rounded up by local, state and federal officers during a series of 5 a.m. raids concentrated in the city's northeast end.

A woman police were seeking at the house was taken into custody along with another man who was also armed when officers arrived but obeyed orders to drop his gun, said Buffalo Police Commissioner H. McCarthy Gipson.

Gipson said the officers announced themselves when they went in.

“They are very obvious in all of the equipment, gear, uniform,” he said. “They're screaming at the top of their lungs, `Police, Police, Police!' when they make an entry like that, so there is no confusion that you can confuse them with a citizen or someone else who is breaking into your home.”

The officer, a member of the Niagara County Sheriff's Department's Emergency Response Team, was placed on administrative leave, standard practice while a shooting is being reviewed. Gipson said it appeared two shots were fired inside the house, both of them by the officer.

Despite the death, officials called “Operation Third Strike” a success, pointing to the arrest of 23 people, several of whom face mandatory life sentences if convicted because of the “three strikes” law for which the operation was named. Officers, acting on 21 search warrants, seized more than $100,000 in cash, drugs and 17 assault rifles, shotguns and handguns.

Authorities identified Wallace Peace of Buffalo as the targeted operation's kingpin, but released little information about him. U.S. Attorney Terrance Flynn described several wiretaps as “very fruitful” in tracking the movement of drugs and money since April.

“People will be able to sleep easier and the city will be a safer place,” Mayor Byron Brown said at a news conference with Gipson, Flynn and other officials.

The sweep was the first undertaken in Buffalo with funding from the New York/New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which makes available federal grants for crime fighting, HIDTA area director Chauncey Parker said. Congress added Buffalo and several other upstate cities and counties to the HIDTA earlier this year.

“It's really trying to reduce crime in our neighborhoods in whatever way we can,” Parker said. “This is a classic case where guns and drugs and violent people are taken off the streets so people can live in peace.”

About 400 officers and agents from Buffalo and surrounding cities and counties, along with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, participated in the investigation and morning raids.