Jakarta – Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights will investigate accusations that soldiers executed as many as 50 people in East Timor earlier this month in a military operation against armed rebels in the troubled province, the Government said Tuesday.

Marzuki Darusman, the commission's vice president, said a senior commission member would investigate allegations of the executions and of arbitrary arrests by the armed forces between Nov. 10 and Nov. 16 in the sub-district of Alas on the southern coast of East Timor. He said the investigator would be Clementino Dos Reis Amaral, a commission member from East Timor.

Citing "very reliable sources," the former Portuguese Governor of East Timor, Mario Carrascalao, said today that he has been told that 42 people had been executed and more than 40 wounded and that 200 others were missing in the Alas area.

Carrascalao, speaking in Jakarta, said he was willing to go himself to help investigate the allegations. He said the area where the killings were reported was also a site for resettlement of Javanese under a contentious Government program.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said today that a team it sent to the area had found "no confirmation of large-scale atrocities."

Portugal, the former colonial ruler of East Timor, suspended United Nations-brokered talks with Indonesia in New York on Friday after the first reports that civilians had been killed in an area where guerrillas are active. Carrascalao said the talks were to resume Tuesday.

In the East Timor capital, Dili, as many as 2,000 East Timorese students continue to occupy the local parliament building in protest against the alleged killings by the Indonesian troops.

The Australian-based East Timor Human Rights Center, considered the main watchdog group for East Timorese rights, issued a statement today accusing the Indonesian military of executing 50 East Timorese and arresting 30 others, including two teen-age girls. It said it had identified 14 of those killed and expressed grave fears for the safety of the detainees.

"The killings and arrests in the Alas sub-district have followed the recent build-up of Indonesian troops in the area," the report said, adding that the alleged killings may have been in retaliation for an attack on the troops by rebels of the East Timorese Armed Resistance in which 3 Indonesian soldiers were killed and 13 captured.

The report said that following the rebel attack on Nov. 9, troops attacked a village on Nov. 13, arresting and later killing the chief and four other people.