MEXICO CITY: Mexican soldiers arbitrarily executed two people after an illegal raid last year, a national rights body said on Tuesday, releasing its findings as protests disrupted a debate in the Senate over a contentious bill to give the military more powers.

The military, deployed in Mexico’s war on drug gangs for over a decade, has been embroiled in several rights scandals including the extrajudicial killings of gang members and the disappearance of 43 students near one of its bases in 2014.

The case reported by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on its website on Tuesday related to a raid on a home in the western state of Jalisco last year.

The Commission, chosen by the Senate and autonomous from Mexico’s federal government and its president, said the soldiers had tortured and sexually abused people they found there.

After arbitrary detention, soldiers killed two of them by breaking their necks, the Commission said. While its rulings are not binding, the Commission’s recommendations are influential and require a response from the institutions it reports on.

The United Nations human rights chief on Tuesday called on Mexican lawmakers not to pass the bill, saying Mexico needed a stronger police force.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein said the law did not contain strong enough controls to protect civilians from abuses in Mexico, where extrajudicial killings, torture and disappearances are carried out by both security forces and criminal gangs.

“Adopting a new legal framework to regulate the operations of the armed forces in internal security is not the answer. The current draft law risks weakening incentives for the civilian authorities to fully assume their law enforcement roles,” Zeid said in a statement.

Protesters successfully blocked discussion of the bill for much of Tuesday, barring access points to the Senate, and laying out placards warning against the militarisation of the country while pointing to a massive rise in killings since President Felipe Calderon first put the army on the streets in 2016.

“The law is aimed at avoiding the discretional use of the armed forces by the president,” PAN Senator Roberto Gil Zuarth told reporters. “Right now there are no rules. He doesn’t have to tell anybody.”

Reuters