The remains of nine people believed to have been killed by the military were found at several suspected mass grave sites, Secretary General Baharuddin Lopa of the National Commission on Human Rights said.

Two sets of remains were found by the four-man team in sacks in the village of Pasilok on the shores of the Malacca Strait on Friday, he said. ``The two bodies are only two from tens of bodies that had been buried there but because the waves are so big and there was some abrasion, many of the bodies had been carried away by the sea,'' Lopa said. Parts of the hands of two other people were found in Rumah Gedong, also in Pidie district, later on Friday, he said.

Lopa quoted local villagers as saying that they had recently seen soldiers hastily carrying away what appeared to be two corpses froma building long used as a detention centre by the military. In Pringgading, another sub-district in Pidie, the team with the help of the local village chief, located and unearthed one of the five people killed by soldiers. The chief had personally washed and buried the bodies.

``There were five bodies but we only dug up one for evidence. We do not really need to dig up the others as all people in that village said five buried were there,'' Lopa said.

He declined to speculate on the cause of the death saying that would have to await reports by forensic experts. Lopa said on Friday he met 30 to 40 widows of men killed by the military during an operation in North Aceh.

Jakarta sent combat troops to Aceh in the early 1990s to counter an upsurge of separatism activities there and the local rights groups charge the military with hundreds of deaths and abductions.

Early this month, Indonesian military chief General Wiranto apologised for the alleged atrocities and on Thursday the first of the 250 of anestimated 1,000 combat troops withdrew from the region.