Federal prosecutors on Thursday said surveillance footage from Jeffrey Epstein's cell block during his first suicide attempt had been permanently deleted by the jail.

It's yet another misstep surrounding Epstein's case. Federal prosecutors filed charges against two of his guards in November, accusing them of failing to check on him the night he died by suicide.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Federal prosecutors have revealed yet another security lapse at the Manhattan jail where Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in August.

In a document filed to court Thursday, first reported by the New York Daily News and reviewed by Insider, prosecutors said they asked the Metropolitan Correctional Center for the surveillance footage recorded outside Epstein's cell from the night of his first suicide attempt in July.

But the jail, they said, accidentally preserved video footage from the wrong part of the building.

"The Government has learned that the MCC 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 (i.e. the requested video) no longer exists," Assistant US Attorneys Maurene Comey and Jason Swergold wrote in the filing.

The court filing says that there was a "backup system in place" to store the video but that it was nonetheless deleted sometime in August because of "technical errors." Prosecutors first told the court in December that the footage had gone missing.

It's yet another misstep in the Epstein case

Epstein was found dead on August 10 in the jail cell where he was being held on sex-trafficking charges involving minors. His death was ruled a suicide.

Two of the security guards who were supposed to regularly check on him overnight were later charged with failing to do their jobs. The indictment accuses them of leaving him alone for hours at a time and falsifying documents saying they had checked on him. Both guards have denied wrongdoing.

Jeffrey Epstein. Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

The Washington Post initially reported that the video outside Epstein's cell on the night of his death was "unusable." But in November, the Justice Department said in a court filing that security footage from outside Epstein's cell block showed that no one entered or left the area on the night of his death, dispelling conspiracy theories about the disgraced financier's death.

Attorney General William Barr acknowledged in November that his department has repeatedly bungled its handling of Epstein's suicide, calling it "a perfect storm of screwups." He said the FBI was still pursuing anyone who might have helped Epstein sexually abuse young girls and has asked the Justice Department's inspector general to examine the case.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which oversees the Metropolitan Correctional Center, declined Business Insider's request for comment, citing the Justice Department investigations.