A MANUS Island MP has reportedly said that two Iranian asylum seekers allegedly bashed by police and PNG immigration officials on New Year’s Eve “deserved what they got.”

Ronny Knight told Fairfax Media the men, identified only as Mehdi and Mohammad, were treated like any local who would resist arrest.

“This is Papua New Guinea. This is not Australia,” Mr Knight, PNG’s Vice Minister for Trade, Commerce and Industry, said. “These two were drunk out of their brains and stopping traffic and punching cars and harassing women as they were walking home from the night market.”

However a friend of the asylum seekers said they were the victims of an unprovoked assault and will plead not guilty when they face court today.

“The refugees said the first to attack them were two PNG immigration officers who were drunk and came to them and said ‘you don’t have the right to be outside of the prison [detention centre] at this moment’,” Iranian Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani told Fairfax.

“After a few minutes the police joined them and beat them extremely badly in the head, face, back and hands.”

The Iranian refugees, who were arrested after allegedly being bashed by up to 10 police on Manus Island on New Year’s Eve, have been released from custody.

The Refugee Action Coalition claims the men were detained for 36 hours and had been denied medical treatment for serious injuries including a broken wrist, jaw and nose.

“The arrest and bashing has highlighted the human rights abuses inflicted on refugees on Manus inside and outside the detention centre,” spokesman Ian Rintoul said in a statement on Monday.

He said the medical condition of one of the men had deteriorated overnight and he had blood in his urine.

Border Force officers visited the police station on Monday morning and had offered to take the refugees to get medical treatment at the detention centre’s clinic, Mr Rintoul said.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton says he wants to get all the facts before commenting, adding refugee advocates are using the incident to attack the government’s immigration policies.

“If people have had an interaction with the PNG police on a New Year’s Eve night, I would wait to see the full facts of that case before I’d make any comment to say that they were targeted because they were refugees or because they were part of the Manus Island population,” Mr Dutton told 2GB Radio.

“I would wait to see the police side of the story before making any comment.”

The PNG government has slated the Manus Island detention centre for closure but no time frame has been set. The Australian government is looking for third countries to resettle refugees from Manus Island and Nauru.