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Rikers guards kept from rescuing a comrade — to avoid lawsuits

Rikers Island officers were ordered to just stand by and watch as a colleague got savagely beaten by a mob of inmates — because correction supervisors feared getting hit with criminal charges, The Post has learned.

About 15 violent jailbirds pummeled the unidentified victim inside the Anna M. Kross Center on Saturday, sources said.

Other correction officers immediately responded to the unprovoked attack, but were ordered not to intervene, the sources said.

“The captains gave the officers a direct order to not use force to break up the assault; meanwhile, an officer was right in front of them being attacked,” a source said.

“That would’ve been a green light to destroy the inmates, but out of fear of indictment, the captains said: ‘Don’t use force, you could get indicted.’ ”

The attack lasted about 10 minutes until the inmates “lost steam,” but they later went wild again and tore down the ceiling in an intake room where they had been herded, a source said.

More than a dozen current and former Rikers Island officers have been busted on assault and other charges in recent years, including ex-assistant chief of security Eliseo Perez Jr., who last year resigned days before getting indicted for allegedly ordering the 2012 beating of an inmate.

At the time, Correction Officers Benevolent Association President Norman Seabrook said the guards involved in that case were “merely defending themselves” and accused authorities of conducting a “witch hunt.”

The Correction Department denied that any guards were held back during Saturday’s incident, which erupted around 2:25 p.m. inside a “mental observation unit” where two inmates attacked an officer who wouldn’t let one of them into a closet that the inmate mistakenly thought held his belongings.

“Officers were deployed to the unit within minutes to quell the incident and did so without hesitancy,” a spokesperson said.

A total of five officers wound up hurt, including one who got his nose broken, and five inmates identified as the “main perpetrators” were arrested and charged in the attack.

“Our correction officers are trained and prepared to deal with any number of unpredictable and at times dangerous event,” the spokesperson added.