A newspaper in Siberia has published a video purportedly showing an inmate being tortured by a prison guard.

The Novosti Krasnoyarsk newspaper placed the video on its website on November 5. It shows an officer cursing and threatening an inmate for the latter's refusal to perform cleaning duties at the Corrective Colony No. 7 in the city of Krasnoyarsk.

After the inmate refuses to follow the officer's instructions, the officer forces him to a bathroom and puts the inmate's head into a toilet.

The newspaper did not specify how its journalists obtained the video and identified the officer as the chief of the search department of the Federal Penitentiary Service's (FSIN) operative directorate in the Krasnoyarsk region, who earlier testified as a witness in a trial about another inmate's torture.

FSIN officials in the region said they have launched preliminary investigations into the video.

Torture by guards in Russian prisons has sparked a public outcry in recent years.

Since July 2018, Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta newspaper has published several videos showing apparent torture of inmates in a prison in the city of Yaroslavl, some 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow.

Russian law enforcement authorities have arrested at least 12 guards at that prison and say that prior complaints of torture by inmates across Russia would be investigated.