JEREMY Hunt has said he will visit Myanmar at the “earliest opportunity” to seek answers after a UN report called for military leaders to be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

The Foreign Secretary described the report as “deeply disturbing” and said there should “never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities”.

Investigators working for the UN’s top human rights body took the unusual step of identifying six military leaders by name among those behind what they called deadly, systematic crimes against the ethnic minority.

The call amounts to some of the strongest language yet from UN officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Myanmar (formerly Burma) since a bloody crackdown began last August.

Mr Hunt tweeted: “Deeply disturbing to read UN report on crimes against Rohingya people.

“There must be never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities.

"Have decided to visit Burma to seek answers at the earliest opportunity.”

The three-member “fact-finding mission” and their team, working under a mandate from the UN-backed Human Rights Council, meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts from expatriate Rohingya, as well as satellite footage and other information to assemble the report.

“The military’s contempt for human life, dignity and freedom, for international law in general, should be a cause of concern for the entire population of Myanmar, and to the international community as a whole,” fact-finding mission chair Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney-general, told a news conference.

The council created the mission in March last year, nearly six months before a string of deadly rebel attacks on security and police posts set off a crackdown that drove Rohingya to flee into neighbouring Bangladesh.

More than 700,000 people are thought to have fled, according to UN estimates.

The team compiled accounts of crimes including gang rape, the torching of hundreds of villages, enslavement, and killings of children, some before the eyes of their own parents.

But it was not granted access to Myanmar and has decried a lack of co-operation or even response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.