The Royal Nepalese Army Friday denied a top UN official's accusation that it was violating human rights of Maoist suspects with impunity.

The army said it abided by the country's constitution. 

During a four-day visit, UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour came down both on the Maoist guerrillas, whose nine-year-old insurgency has cost nearly 11,000 lives, and the security forces, citing instances of arbitrary arrests, torture in custody and extra-judicial killings. 

Arbour said that there was "an alarming, and growing, number of cases in which the fundamental rights of the people of Nepal have been abused by agents of the state and in which victims have been unable to obtain redress.

"A climate of impunity prevails in this country as a result of which the rule of law, the fundamental glue of any society, is being worryingly eroded."

A local daily subsequently carried a report saying the UN official had warned the Nepalese government that Nepalese soldiers would not be recruited to the UN peacekeeping forces if the army did not show better respect for human rights.

"We object to the word impunity," army spokesman Brigadier-General Dipak Gurung said in the army headquarters here Friday. "The army is a constitutional body operating under the constitution in a legal manner."

Gurung said there had been cases when individual soldiers had committed rights violations. But the incidents had been investigated and the guilty punished.

"The institution should not be blamed for the mistakes of the individual," he said.

Gurung said the UN had recently made a request for additional forces from Nepal.  There are about 3,000 Nepalese soldiers currently in the UN peacekeeping forces in places as diverse as Haiti, Burundi and Liberia. 

In addition, he said the UN had asked for 425 men to be posted in Sudan.