Chris Brummitt, Jakarta – Indonesia's military promised Saturday to investigate claims that it carried out extra-judicial killings and torture in Papua province. But it warned that if the charges were not true, it would pursue legal action against the body that made them, the National Commission on Human Rights.

"We are not prepared to be slandered," military spokesman Col. Djazairi Nachrowi said. He did not specify what form of legal action the military might take.

There have been frequent charges that soldiers battling separatists in Indonesia's easternmost province were guilty of extra-judicial killings and other abuses. The National Commission on Human Rights is state-funded but independent of the government. In the past, it has angered the military by alleging it committed rights abuses in Aceh, another province that is wracked by separatist violence.

On Friday, commission member Safroedin Bahar alleged that troops killed seven Papuans and forcible evacuated some 7,000 others from the Wamena district in central Papua in 2001. The soldiers were said to have been searching for the killers of two soldiers in the area. He also alleged paramilitary policemen killed three villagers in 2001 in the Wasior district after rebels killed six officers guarding a logging concern there. Bahar said the commission would launch further investigations into both incidents. Those findings could be used as evidence in human rights tribunals.

Abuses by the country's poorly trained and underfunded military in Aceh and Papua fuel separatist sentiment in both provinces, which are rich in natural resources but remain desperately poor. Indonesia occupied Papua, a former Dutch colony on the western side of Papua New Guinea island, in 1963.

In November 2001, seven soldiers were found guilty in the murder of Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay, who advocated a peaceful secessionist struggle. They were sentenced to between two and three years in prison.