Burkina Faso has rejected “baseless allegations” that soldiers massacred 223 people in attacks in February.
According to a Human Rights Watch report, on February 25, the army killed 179 people in the village of Soro and 44 others in Nondin, including at least 56 children.
The NGO said this was “one of the worst attacks by the army” in the country in almost a decade.
Burkinabe authorities said they had launched a legal investigation to “establish the facts” and condemned HRW’s report.
“The government of Burkina Faso firmly rejects and condemns such unfounded allegations,” Communications Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo said in a statement late Saturday.
The minister also expressed surprise that “while this investigation is underway to establish the facts and identify the perpetrators, HRW, with limitless imagination, was able to identify ‘the culprits’ and pass judgment.”
Earlier this week, officials in the military-ruled country suspended the BBC and U.S. public broadcaster Voice of America over their coverage of the HRW report.
In a statement released Thursday, HRW said the alleged mass killings “appear to be part of a large-scale military campaign against civilians accused of collaborating with Islamist armed groups and may constitute crimes against humanity.”
Villagers who survived the attack told HRW that a military convoy of more than 100 soldiers arrived in the village of Nondin about 30 minutes after Islamist fighters passed nearby.
The soldiers went door to door and drove residents out of their homes.
“They then herded the villagers into groups before opening fire on them,” the report said, citing witness and survivor accounts.
An hour later, the soldiers arrived in Soro, about five kilometers away, and also gathered and shot at the villagers, the survivors added.
In both villages, soldiers also shot those who tried to hide or flee, witnesses said.
The alleged mass killings are believed to be a retaliation by the military, which accused the villagers of supporting armed Islamist fighters.
They followed an attack by Islamist militants on a nearby military camp in the northern province of Yatenga.
One survivor was quoted as saying that before the shootings, soldiers had accused residents of not cooperating with them by not informing them about the Islamist militants’ movements.
“The massacres in the villages of Nondin and Soro are just the latest mass killings of civilians by the Burkina Faso military as part of its counterinsurgency operations,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
The Sahel country is ruled by a military junta that seized power in a coup in 2022 and promised to end the uprising.
However, violence continued to escalate, with more than a third of Burkina Faso controlled by jihadist groups.
International and human rights groups, including the European Union and the United Nations, have accused Burkina Faso of serious human rights abuses in its fight against insurgency, including the indiscriminate killings and enforced disappearances of dozens of civilians.
Supporters of the military junta have previously criticized the media for reporting on alleged atrocities, saying the reporting was aimed at damaging the morale of Burkina Faso’s armed forces.
The authorities’ statement also criticized a “media campaign focused on these allegations” that “shows the stated intent to… discredit our armed forces.”
BBC and Voice of America broadcasts were stopped and both organizations’ websites were blocked for two weeks, officials said.
In a statement on Thursday, Burkina Faso’s media regulator warned all media outlets not to cover the report and threatened sanctions, state media reported.