The court appearance of the four men accused by Russia of carrying out the Moscow massacre of 137 innocent concert goers at the Crocus City Hall venue told its own grim story. All the suspects bore marks of torture: one was wearing a bandage on his ear, following reports that it may have been at least partially severed and forcibly fed to him during his interrogation; another was semi-conscious and appeared to be missing an eye. Meanwhile, a video did the rounds seemingly showing one of the men’s genitals hooked up to an electricity generator.

The footage of the battered men was shocking to tender western eyes, but hardly surprising: Putin’s security forces owe more to the inherited interrogation methods of Beria and Yezhov than they do to Dixon of Dock Green. The rough handling of the men charged with carrying out one of the worst terrorist atrocities of modern times was met with widespread public approval in Russia.

Information extracted by methods of torture can be wildly unreliable

Although Russia officially abolished the death penalty in 1996, the accused Tajik terrorist suspects will almost certainly share the fate of Alexei Navalny if they are convicted and sent to the Gulag. Indeed, former president and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev has already openly declared that they should, and will, be killed.

What will raise some eyebrows is that the Russian authorities are not even making token efforts to hide the fact that they tortured these prisoners. Quite the opposite: they are openly celebrating it. The knife allegedly used to sever the suspect’s ear has been auctioned on the internet, and the team who detained the accused have already been decorated with medals for their efforts.

The open avowal of torture by a modern nation not only gives us a stark glimpse into Putin’s police state, but raises an age old ethical question: is the use of torture ever justified?

Torture has traditionally been regarded as beyond the pale by civilised countries. Though officially sanctioned in Britain in early modern times, by the 18th century the rack in the Tower of London had fallen into disuse and the gruesome punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering for treason had also largely been discontinued.

The torture of helpless prisoners by the Nazis and Imperial Japan in the Second World War was denounced as one of the worst crimes of those criminal regimes. Torture was universally outlawed by the newly established United Nations in the aftermath of the war – although it continued to be widely practised.

One of the most notorious uses of torture by a western state after the Second World War was the dirty conflict fought by France against nationalist rebels in Algeria in the 1950s. Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous film The Battle of Algiers showed French troops using electric shocks and water boarding their victims in unsparing detail.

The exposure of such ‘Gestapo methods’ by France did much to undermine public support for the Algerian war and paved the way for the French retreat from Algeria. But torture raised an uncomfortable point: it sometimes worked, and prevented terrorist atrocities.

Information extracted from prisoners under torture enabled the French to actually win the Battle of Algiers, though they eventually lost the war. I once interviewed Simon Murray, an English businessman (he founded the Orange IT company) who as a young man had joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in Algeria.

I asked him whether the torture used by France during the conflict had ever been justified. Murray’s answer was unequivocal: ‘If I knew a terrorist had planted a bomb in a crowded cafe and wouldn’t tell me where it was, I’d have pulled his ears off’.

The trouble with that argument is that those suffering torture tend to tell their tormentors what they want to hear just to stop the pain. Therefore, that information extracted by such methods can be wildly unreliable. Justifying torture also ignores the corrupting effect that it has on the torturers themselves.

Nevertheless, the public outrage provoked by such crimes as the Crocus Hall massacre means that sympathy for the accused perpetrators is likely to be very limited.

Britain’s official disapproval of the brutality of Putin’s regime is tempered by the fact that we too have used torture in our own wars with terror. Torture was practised by Britain as it withdrew from its Empire in colonial conflicts like the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. More recently, there were the harsh interrogation methods such as ‘white noise’ was used against the IRA in the I970s, and water boarding was widely practiced by the US against Islamists after 9/11. In a notably hypocritical washing of hands during the West’s ‘war against terror’, suspects were illegally ‘rendered’ to countries where they were tortured, so that western agencies did not need to do the torture themselves.

Torturing innocent people merely for the sadistic pleasure of the torturers – as was widely practiced for example in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s – remains officially castigated in the West. Yet disapproval of the cruelty inflicted on those who have themselves committed horrendous crimes against the innocent will remain distinctly muted.