A man who filmed the torture and beheading of a Syrian prisoner is identified as member of Russian private military company Wagner with ties to the Kremlin.

The footage is thought to have been filmed in an oil field west of Palmyra, Syria, in 2017.

A snippet of the video first emerged at the time of the incident but the full version that shows the extent of the torture was only released last week.

The footage is thought to have been filmed in an oil field west of Palmyra, Syria, in 2017 as four Russian-speaking soldiers attack a Syrian national who deserted from a unit

In the clip, a man can be seen laying on the ground and is surrounded by a small group of four men all dressed in camouflage.

The group break the victim's legs with a sledgehammer before crushing his chest, beheading him and cutting off his lower arms.

They then hang his corpse by his legs and set the body on fire.

The victim was identified as Mohammed Taha Ismail al-Abdullah, a Syrian national, who was accused of deserting from a unit that was loyal to the country's president.

Russian media outlets have since claimed to have successfully used facial recognition software to identify one of the soldiers involved.

The Kremlin's press secretary said: 'We have no information and no relationship to these people.' Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin

The Novaya Gazeta newspaper say that one of the men, named as Stanislav D, was known to have been employed in Wagner units - a Russian private military company - in Syria.

He was a former police officer from the Stavropol region in southern Russia before joining Wagner in 2016 to 'protect' the country's interests abroad.

The newspaper did not release the soldier's full last name in order to protect his family from possible reprisals.

But the Kremlin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said: 'We have no information and no relationship to these people.'

He also added that there would be 'no answer' to the question of whether the president felt that a government probe was warranted, as he spoke to journalists during a daily briefing on Friday.

Wagner is a military contractor that was founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin who is a close friend of the Russian President.

Its mercenaries have also fought in Ukraine and the Central African Republic, and are said to be active in Libya, Sudan and Mozambique.