MEXICO CITY — Prosecutors in Mexico formally presented homicide charges Monday against four soldiers implicated in the Feb. 26 shooting deaths of five men in the border city of Nuevo Laredo.

The killings in the cartel-dominated city, across the border from Laredo, Texas, caused outrage because the occupants of the vehicle the army fired on were apparently unarmed.

The civilian court system said the four soldiers would be held in pretrial detention at an army base in Mexico City that houses a military prison. They also face attempted homicide charges because a sixth man was wounded in the incident.

The four soldiers had said they heard a loud bang and opened fire on what they claimed was a fleeing vehicle.

In March, Mexico’s governmental human rights agency called the shooting unjustified.

The commission issued a report stating that four of the 21 soldiers on patrol that morning had opened fire. The report said those four soldiers had fired a total of 117 shots at the vehicle, with three soldiers saying they had opened fire to support the soldier who started the shooting.

Soldiers in four patrol vehicles had followed the vehicle, a pickup truck, in the pre-dawn hours based on a “suspicion” and did not follow proper procedure when they engaged the vehicle, according to the report.

Mexico’s Defense Department had said earlier that the soldiers had heard gunshots and approached a pickup truck, which had no license plates and had its headlights off despite the darkness. The truck then “accelerated in a brusque and evasive way,” according to the Defense Department.

According to the soldiers, the speeding pickup then crashed into a parked vehicle. Soldiers said that when they heard the crash, they opened fire. The army did not say whether the soldiers thought the bang was a gunshot.

There was no indication in crime scene reports of any weapons being found in the pickup after the shootings, and the human rights commission said there was no evidence that any shots had been fired at the army patrol.

Mexico has a military court system, but soldiers must be tried in civilian courts for offenses that involve nonmilitary victims. The court was scheduled to hold an initial hearing on the charges on Wednesday.

Nuevo Laredo is dominated by the violent Northeast drug cartel, and soldiers and marines have frequently come under fire from heavily armed cartel gunmen there.

The city has also been the scene of human rights violations by the military in the past.

In 2021, Mexico’s Navy turned over to civilian prosecutors 30 marines who were accused of rounding up supposed suspects during anti-crime operations, some of whom subsequently disappeared.

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