The Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta has published more videos purportedly showing inmates at a notorious prison colony being tortured and abused by guards.
The videos, published on July 17, add to previous ones obtained last year by the newspaper that also showed guards torturing inmates at Corrective Colony No. 1 in the city of Yaroslavl, 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow.
When the paper published the first batch last year, it caused an uproar among rights groups and civil society organizations, who said it was indicative of brutal conditions in Russian prisons.
The uproar resulted in the arrest of at least 15 guards and the former warden of the prison.
The newspaper said that the new videos were provided by Public Verdict, a nongovernmental organization that assists victims of human rights abuses.
It cited the NGO as saying that the videos were taken by a prison guard's body camera in February 2016, showing several inmates being beaten, at least two of them severely.
The videos were deleted from the body camera, the newspaper said, but experts then recovered them.
One former inmate, Ruslan Vakhapov, told Novaya gazeta that the videos showed how guards tried to take another inmate out of a special punishment cell to a room.
Vakhapov said the inmate was beaten after he complained about not being allowed to get toilet paper from a bag containing his personal belongings.
The video also shows other inmates trying to prevent the man being moved from the cell.
One of the inmates is shown trying to injure himself, by banging his head on a wall. The inmate was effectively trying to threaten the guards, Vakhapov said, since guards try to avoid inflicting visible injuries on those who are about to be released, in order to hide evidence of the assaults or torture.
In other video, a female officer who is identified as a prison doctor asks another guard if a beaten inmate's buttocks are “blue” -- that is, covered in bruises.
The other guard answers: "We have released many others with blue asses before. So what?"
In November, investigators opened a probe into the alleged torture of 25 inmates in a second prison in the Yaroslavl region.
There was no immediate reaction by the federal prisons agency to the newspaper's report.