Iran prison chief apologises over abuse in leaked film

IRAN’S prison chief has apologised after hackers exposed CCTV footage of abuse by guards at the notorious Evin jail, where British nationals are being held on disputed espionage charges.

A series of videos showed guards beating inmates, an emaciated prisoner being dragged across a car park, overcrowded single cells and one man breaking a mirror to try to cut his arm.

Mohammad Mehdi Hajmohammadi, the prison chief, took responsibility for the “unacceptable behaviour” and yesterday vowed to “avoid the repeat of such bitter incidents as well as confront the perpetrators”.

The footage is not believed to show the parts of Evin controlled by Iran’s

Revolutionary Guards where political prisoners and those with Western ties are held. Nazanin Zaghari-ratcliffe, currently under house arrest in Tehran, was locked up there for four years.

The hack was by a group calling itself The Justice of Ali – a reference to both the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law and a slight against Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.

They said the videos were among “hundreds” of gigabytes of data they claim to have stolen several months ago and more footage will follow.

The cyber attack was a “very serious intervention in the regime’s security and intelligence apparatus”, said London-based cyber security expert Amin Sabet. He said the attack would have taken months to organise by a group of “highly professional” hackers.