Bangkok: A new video has emerged of Myanmar soldiers kicking, beating and threatening to kill six ethnic villagers as they were handcuffed on the ground.
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The footage posted on Facebook also shows a soldier holding a machete to a villager's throat.
"I will cut your throat and kill you," he says.
#Myanmar Army soldiers savagely beat ethnic men, authorities should urgently investigate: pic.twitter.com/5RcBFAqVnL??? Fortify Rights (@FortifyRights) May 27, 2017
Matthew Smith, founder the campaign group Fortify Rights, called on Myanmar authorities to immediately investigate the footage to determine the well-being and whereabouts of the detained men and prosecute the soldiers.
Details on when and where the violence took place are murky but Mr Smith believes it happened recently.
"This is one of the rare cases where we can see the soldiers committing torture in conflict zones," he said.
Reuters reported the victims were being questioned as to whether they belonged to the Taang National Liberation Army, an ethnic armed group based in Myanmar's eastern Shan State.
Myanmar authorities have not commented.
Earlier this year a selfie-style video taken by a police border guard in Myanmar's western Rakhine State showed the kicking and beating of Rohingya Muslims, sparking outrage.
In January 2016 another video showed Burmese soldiers being brutally punched and kicked by senior officers in an army barracks.
Rights groups accuse Myanmar's military of continuing to commit gross human rights abuses in border areas where conflicts with ethnic minority groups are still raging, despite the election of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in 2015.
Under an army-written constitution the military retains a quarter of all seats in Parliament and controls the country's key security ministries.
Ms Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, has been unable or unwilling to confront the military over atrocities in Rakhine that the UN says could amount to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
Her government has not commented on the latest video.
Fifty-nine Myanmar-based civil society organisations have called on the government to cooperate with a UN inquiry into the violence that broke out after police border posts were attacked in October last year,
The military and government have denied atrocities have happened despite the UN documenting eye-witness accounts and more than 80,000 Rohingya fleeing the state to squalid Bangladesh border camps.
After a year in power, Ms Suu Kyi hosted a new round of peace talks between the military, ethnic groups, elected officials and observers from civil society groups, in the capital Naypyitaw last week.
