Gen. Kayani's statement Friday said an inquiry board would be set up headed by a major general and two to three senior officers who have experience investigating such incidents. It did not give a deadline for the investigation.
Pakistan is of such strategic importance to the war effort in Afghanistan that U.S. officials may hesitate to suspend military aid over allegations of human rights violations.
To maintain Pakistan's cooperation in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. routinely waived laws aimed at preventing aid to a country making nuclear weapons. Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb in 1998.
Rights activists said past army inquiries into alleged extrajudicial killings and abuses had held no one accountable.
"We hope that this will in fact be a meaningful inquiry and not a sham perpetrated to assuage international concerns," Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch said of the latest probe.
The footage has received very little, if any, media coverage in Pakistan. The army is the country's most powerful institution, and newspapers and TV stations are very careful about how they cover its activities.
Neverthless, the clips could hurt efforts by the army to win public backing for its campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Swat and other parts of the northwest close to the Afghan border. Journalists have limited access to most of the conflict zones, making it difficult to document the military's activities in full.
In October, video apparently showing Pakistani soldiers beating men detained in anti-militant operations in the northwest surfaced on Facebook and YouTube. The army said it would investigate, but has not publicly released the results of any probe.
