YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar officials have denied a report of five mass graves of Rohingya in a village in crisis-hit Rakhine, a border region gutted by a military crackdown on the Muslim minority.

On Saturday (Feb 3), government media reported that Rakhine state authorities had refuted a recent Associated Press investigation that said testimony from Rohingya refugees and time-stamped cell phone videos revealed the existence of five previously unreported mass graves in Rakhine's Gu Dar Pyin village.

After an inspection of the village, a team of officials, police and locals "refuted the AP report," said the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar.

"The villagers reiterated they had not heard of any massacres near their village," it added.

The Myanmar government's Information Committee said in a statement on its Facebook page that a government inspection team had gone to the village to probe the report and found it to be false.

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The report, which AFP could not independently verify, described grisly violence at the hands of soldiers and Buddhist vigilantes, who allegedly attacked villagers with guns, knives, rocket launchers and grenades before dumping bodies into pits and dousing them with acid.

Satellite images showed a village that has been completely wiped out, with villagers interviewed in refugee camps in Bangladesh claiming that up to 400 people could have been killed, according to the report.

The Information Committee said there had been deadly clashes between security forces and Rohingya militants in the village on Aug 28 which left 19 "terrorists" dead.

"Nineteen dead terrorists were found... the bodies were buried," the statement said, without giving details on the location or nature of the graves.

Myanmar troops are accused of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya, nearly 700,000 of whom have fled to Bangladesh since last August.

Myanmar denies the allegation, saying it launched a proportionate crackdown on Rohingya rebels, but has blocked reporters and UN investigators from independently accessing the conflict zone.

The severe restrictions on media access imposed by Myanmar make it difficult to verify the flood of testimony gathered from Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

This week, a spokesman for the UN secretary general said he was "very concerned" about the report of mass graves, adding that it "underscores the need for the UN to have access to Rakhine state".

Last month, the army made a rare admission that four members of the security forces helped kill 10 Rohingya militant suspects on Sept 2 and left their bodies in a hastily dug pit.

Rights groups say that incident is the tip of the iceberg of abuses.

Doctors Without Borders estimates that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed in the first month of the military crackdown.

The army has put the official death toll of the conflict at 400.