Two New Zealand detainees on Christmas Island claim they had been punished for trying to expose guards abusing an asylum seeker.
They recently posted CCTV footage from two years ago on Facebook showing Serco guards at the Australian immigration detention centre manhandling the Egyptian asylum seeker.
The asylum seeker, Ossama Wahab, originally posted the video online himself.
He had accused the Australian Federal Police of covering up his complaint of being badly injured in the April 2015 incident, but officials said there was not enough evidence to take action.
The two other detainees posted the footage two weeks ago and one said he was put in an isolation cell after refusing to remove the video.
“They asked us to take the footage down. Once we refused that then, a couple of days later, they came about four, five in the morning and took us to segregation and started accusing us of trying to start a riot,” said Rakhim Mataia, a 22-year-old from Christchurch.
Johanan Andrews, 21, who left Auckland for Brisbane as a five-year-old, said he was put in segregation — an isolation cell where a person is let out for one hour a day.
“I was up there for six days. I’m getting mistreated in here,” he told RNZ on a landline phone from Green 2 compound, one of eight compounds at the centre.
Mr Wahab said he posted the video on Facebook late last month, after fighting for months for action.
He described a guard allegedly getting upset with him on the way back from White 1 compound on April 23, 2015.
The CCTV footage, released by Serco as part of a police investigation, shows a detainee being forced to the floor without any apparent provocation and held there by six guards for three minutes, then dragged off.
Mr Wahab said he was taken to an isolation cell.
“They jump on me, and they started bashing me … I mean I couldn’t breathe at that time, I was dying … he’s put his knees next to my face, I couldn’t even not breathe, nothing.”
Mr Wahab claimed he lost a tooth and has an injured arm.
Serco and the Australian Immigration Department said in brief statements to RNZ that federal police had found insufficient evidence to take any action.
Mr Wahab said he pressed assault charges against the guards and believed they were still before the court, but that it was difficult to determine.
Mr Mataia and Mr Andrews claimed the sort of mistreatment described by Mr Wahab was still occurring, though slightly less frequently than when they both first arrived at Christmas Island nine months ago.
All three detainees told RNZ they wanted to challenge the secrecy maintained by the Australian Government around the centre, where it was suspected about 150 New Zealand-born men were being held indefinitely.
The Australian Immigration Department declined to comment, to give the number — though it said, as of May, a total of 176 New Zealand-born people were detained in Australian detention centres.
