Burkina Faso has rejected “baseless accusations” that soldiers massacred 223 people in attacks in February.

A Human Rights Watch report alleged the army killed 179 people in Soro village and 44 others in Nondin, at least 56 of who were children, on 25 February.

The NGO said this was “among the worst army abuse” incidents in the country in nearly a decade.

Burkinabè authorities said they had opened a legal inquiry to “establish the facts” and condemned HRW’s report.

“The government of Burkina Faso strongly rejects and condemns such baseless accusations,” communications minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo said in a statement late on Saturday.

The minister also expressed his surprise that “while this inquiry is under way to establish the facts and identify the authors, HRW has been able, with boundless imagination, to identify ‘the guilty’ and pronounce its verdict”.

Earlier this week, officials in the military-ruled country suspended the BBC and US public broadcaster Voice of America over their coverage of the HRW report.

In a statement released on Thursday, HRW said the alleged mass killings “appear to be part of a widespread military campaign against civilians accused of collaborating with Islamist armed groups, and may amount to crimes against humanity”.

Villagers who survived the attack told HRW that a military convoy of more than 100 soldiers descended on Nondin village, about 30 minutes after Islamist fighters passed nearby.

The soldiers went door-to-door, ejecting residents from their homes.

“They then rounded up villagers in groups before opening fire on them,” the report added, citing witness and survivor accounts.

The soldiers arrived in Soro, about 5km (3 miles) away, an hour later, also gathering and shooting at villagers, the survivors added.

In both villages, the soldiers also shot at those who attempted to hide or escape, witnesses said.

The alleged mass killings are believed to be retaliation by the military, which accused the villagers of aiding armed Islamist fighters.

They followed an attack by Islamist fighters on a nearby military camp in the the northern Yatenga province.

A survivor was quoted as saying that before the shootings, the soldiers accused the residents of failing to cooperate with them by not informing them of the movements of the Islamist fighters.

“The massacres in Nondin and Soro villages are just the latest mass killings of civilians by the Burkina Faso military in their counterinsurgency operations,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

The Sahel country is ruled by a military junta, which seized power in a coup in 2022, promising to end the insurgency.

The violence has however 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 UN have accused Burkina Faso of serious human rights violations in its fight against insurgency, including the indiscriminate killings and forced disappearances of dozens of civilians.

Supporters of the military junta have previously criticised the media for reporting alleged atrocities, saying that the reporting is designed to hit the morale of the Burkina Faso armed forces.

The statement from the authorities also hit out at what it described as a “media campaign orchestrated around these accusations” which “shows the avowed intention… to discredit our fighting forces”.

Broadcasts of BBC and Voice of America have been stopped and the websites of both organisations banned for two weeks, officials said.

In a statement on Thursday, Burkina Faso’s media regulator warned all media outlets against covering the report, threatening sanctions, state-owned media reported.