CCTV footage from outside Jeffrey Epstein's jail cell at the time of his first suspected has been deleted, prosecutors say.
The disgraced financier was found in his cell semi-conscious on July 23 last year.
He was later found dead in his cell on August 10, while he was awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges.
The video linked to the first suicide attempt went missing and was then reported to be found, according to the New York Times, but actually turned out to be footage from the wrong tier of the facility.
The Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York said it "inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists", according to court papers reported by NBC.
Details of this emerged during a trial of Nicholas Tartaglione, who was Epstein's cellmate on the day of the incident, over charges of killing four men.
He had been accused of assaulting Epstein on the day of the incident, as one explanation for his condition, and his lawyer asked for the footage in a bid to exonerate him of that accusation.
Epstein's death was officially ruled a suicide after the 66-year-old's body was found in his cell last August.
