Sydney - Australia’s prime minister has launched a public inquiry following the broadcast of footage of children in detention being abused, hooded and bound in a manner likened to Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, according to ther Guardian.

Malcolm Turnbull announced a royal commission hours after the national broadcaster aired shocking footage showing children in detention at the Don Dale facility outside Darwin in the Northern Territory.

Footage aired on the ABC’s Four Corners program on Monday showed one youth being stripped and physically held down by guards.

In another scene that the program compared with images from Guantánamo Bay or the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, 17-year-old Dylan Voller was shown hooded and tied in a restraint chair for two hours.

The chairs are among items recently including in a widened list of “approved restraints” under laws passed by the NT government.

Voller – who was featured repeatedly suffering apparent mistreatment at the hands of guards – and five other former Don Dale prisoners intend to sue the Northern Territory government over their treatment in detention.

Peter O’Brien, the lawyer representing Voller and another former prisoner, Jake Roper, said Voller was currently in a form of segregated imprisonment in an adult prison and called for his immediate release. “The impact of these years of brutalisation must be immediately measured and he needs immediate assistance.”

The footage broadcast on Four Corners was recorded in 2014 and 2015 but the program also looked at long-running issues and instances of mistreatment in the NT’s youth justice system.

Turnbull said that he was “deeply shocked ... and appalled” at the instances of abuse at the centre revealed in the investigation.

The revelations cast a new spotlight on Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people in general and also on the NT government’s hardline approach to crime.

Indigenous youths make up 96% of the young prison population in the Northern Territory and Indigenous people are overwhelmingly represented in the NT prison system across the board. Indigenous people make up 30% of the overall population of the NT.